Pinning applications to the Task Bar

The new Windows 7 operating system has apparently changed the way you access programs (applications). I'm not familiar with Vista, but in XP, you either go to the Start menu, and then choose All Programs, or you can access them via the Quick Launch feature of the Task Bar, which is a lot quicker. However, when you install a new program, it does not always install an icon on the Task Bar. Never fear - you can easily add it manually. Simply drag an icon from your desktop down to just left of the >> (chevron) symbol.

If you drag the dotted vertical line just to the right of the chevron, you can reduce or increase how many of the Quick Launch icons display. Clicking on the chevron pops up a display of the remainder.
As I use this feature extensively, I rapidly found the list becoming unwieldy, so I created folders into which I could group icons.

Unfortunately, finding where to create those folders is a bit laborious. Go to: Documents & Settings/Owner/Application Data/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Quick Launch. However, once you have created one, in future you only have to double-click on the folder in Quick Launch and it brings the folder to the desktop, whereupon you can exit up one level and create more.
Of course, if you'd rather your PC looked more like a Mac, there are several free programs that can turn you Task Bar into a Pac look-alike. For instance, choose from ObjectDock, or XWindows Dock.

Upgrading from XP to Windows 7

The transition from XP to Windows 7 is not going to be smooth - certainly as smooth as from Vista to W7 - if the plethora of online articles is to be believed. I run XP, but don't plan to upgrade until next year at the earliest, probably after the inevitable Service Pack 1 for W7 comes out, and in conjunction with a hardware upgrade, which I'll be due for anyway by then. Hopefully, by then some of the kinks will have been ironed out. Most articles seem to suggest that a clean install is going to work best - that means you effectively wipe your hard drive and start again from scratch. Of course, it also means it's essential to back up all your data. (And let's hope you have the original disks or installation files for all the programs you use!)
If you want to do it sooner, here are a few articles to help you:
First up, an article with lots of screenshots.
Here are five things PC World thinks you should be aware of.
Computerworld has a series of helpful questions and answers.
Assuming the upgrade goes well, PC World explains how the new W7 interface works differently from XP.

Those annoying hard returns when you paste text from a pdf or email

There's one major reason why I cling to Microsoft Word as my primary word processor. It's the ability to fairly easily deal with the mess that you get when you copy and paste text from either a pdf document or an email.
I am sure you will have already discovered that the text frequently comes across with either a hard return (ie, a paragraph return) or a soft return at the end of every line. It's like someone has pressed the enter key or else shift-enter after each line. And, of course, you want the text to flow on as it should. Here's the method I have developed to sort this out:
1) Enter your cursor at the top of the text, and press Ctrl-H, which brings up the Find and Replace dialogue box.
2) In the top field, enter ^p^p. (The symbol ^ is called a carat, by the way.) This will find all instances where there is a double paragraph return, which usually marks where the real paragraph breaks occur.
3) In the bottom field, enter some characters that don't occur in the text, like ##.
4) Click "Find all". You have now created markers for the real paragraphs.
5) In the top field of Find and Replace, enter a single carat and p, eg ^p.
6) In the bottom field, delete the ## and enter a spacebar space.
7) Click "Find all". You have now stripped out all the paragraph returns.
8) To restore the real paragraph breaks, enter ## in the top field, and ^p^p in the bottom field. Click "Find All".
9) Finally, to tidy up, in the top field enter a double spacebar space, and in the bottom field a single spacebar space. This will strip out all the unwanted double spaces.
Voila! The text is now how it should be.
If the document has come across with soft returns rather than hard (paragraph) returns, the same technique can be used. Just insert the search characters ^l instead of ^p. This may seem rather convoluted the first time you try it, but it becomes second nature pretty quickly.
Sadly, only Word seems to have this ability to search using wild characters for paragraph and soft returns - believe me, I have tried all the others, to no avail. Incidentally, the search characters for tab breaks is/are ^t.

USB security, Google, Bing, and technology that makes up dumb

Go away for a couple of days, as I did over the weekend, and when you return your email inbox is filled with several hundred essential emails, at least half of which are not essential at all. In my case, many are newsletters I subscribe to; perhaps I should be more ruthless in unsubscribing.
So it was perhaps good news that Mozilla has launched a software project designed to let people better manage the ever more voluminous stream of messages coming from sources such as Twitter and Facebook into their e-mail. Whether it will help me, as I don't use either Twitter or the social messaging aspects of Facebook, is another matter.
Here are some other interesting items worth checking out...
In a masterpiece of timing, both Google and Microsoft Bing announced new developments with their search engines. (Google seems to be releasing a new development almost every month at the moment. It's hard to keep up. Is it worth keeping up?)
The great thing about today's nearly universal connectivity is how easy it is to share information, pictures and other material with your business associates, friends and family. The bad thing about it is how easy it is for strangers to get access to your data. This is especially true when we carry so much on our USB flash drives, DVDs, laptops and other portable media. A freebie, SafeHouse Explorer, can secure your data on all media, protecting it from unwanted prying eyes.
Like it or not, come Sunday using a handheld mobile phone while driving will be an offence in New Zealand. The lads at the Stuff technology site have some tips on what's allowed, what's not, and how to cope.
Speaking of cellphones, Steve Tobak at BNet asks whether new technologies such as cellphones are making us dumb? (A hint: he believes they are.)
If that's the case, hold on to your hats, because PC World lists five new technologies it believes will change everything. Now can we have a list of the five most significant unintended consequences...