I don’t want to waste time and energy for something, if it can be done more easily and efficiently. And because I’m lazy, I made my Firefox install superefficient, so I can do the main tasks with little energy and time wasted.

In this post I’m going to show you how I’ve done that.

It requires a few Add-ons, some tweaking and the learning of some important keyboard shortcuts.

Lazy Tip #1: Use Mouse Gestures

With the use of mouse gestures you can save a lot of time and energy.

Closing a tab is as easy as holding the right mouse button and dragging it down and then right. No aiming at the little “X” button  or pressing Strg + F4 to close a tab, just down and right. Cool, huh?

Download The FireGestures Add-on

Now after you’ve learned how cool mouse gestures are, go download the FireGestures Add-on and install it.

Installed the Add-on? Good. Now go to the options of the Add-on and be sure to enable all gestures on the Advanced panel.

Now it’s time to learn the gestures.

Basic gestures

All these gestures are made by holding the right mouse button and making moves while pressed.

• Go back: Left
• Go forward: Right
• New tab: Left, Right
• Close tab: Down, Right
• Restore last tab closed: Right, Left
• Previous tab: Up, Left
• Next tab: Up, Right
• Reload: Up, Down

Rocker gestures

Rocker gestures are performed by clicking one mouse button and then the other simultaneously.

• Previous tab: Hold right mouse button, click left
• Next tab: Hold left mouse button, click right

Wheel gestures

Wheel gestures are done by holding the right mouse button and scrolling the middle wheel.

• Scroll up: Browse the history for this tab in a pop-up
• Scroll down: Browse the open tabs in a pop-up

Keypress gestures

Keypress gestures are done by holding Shift or Ctrl and then hovering the links by dragging the right mouse button. They come really handy if you want to open or save a bunch of links at once on a page.

• Hold Shift and hover links with right mouse button: All hovered links are saved as bookmarks
• Hold Ctrl and hover links with right mouse button: All hovered links are opened in new tabs

Tab wheel gestures

• Scroll the mouse wheel while hovering the tab bar: Switch through the tabs back and forth

Advanced stuff: Create your own mouse gesture!

With the recently shown mouse gestures now you can do many frequent tasks by just using your mouse at any point. But what if you frequently go to your home page? It would make sense to create a mouse gesture for it, too.

So, head over to the options of FireGestures by Extras > Add-Ons and then scroll to FireGestures and hit Options. Then go to Mapping.

Now double click on Home to edit the gesture for it. A new window appears where you can “paint” your gesture and save it.

In this example, by making the gesture “Left, Up, Right, Down, Left, Up, Right” now I’ll always get to my Home.

There are over 70 actions you can assign a mouse gesture to. If that is not enough, there are plenty scripts to add more actions.

That’s it for the mouse gestures.

Lazy Tip #2: Become The King of The Keyboard

The king of the keyboard has control over his keyboard and knows every keyboard shortcut to make his life easier. He not only uses them because he thinks it is cool, he uses it because it saves him a lot of time and mouse movements.

Some tricks of the keyboard king are:

• Press F6 instead of clicking on the address bar: You can start typing right away instead of switching your hand to the mouse back and forth.
• Press Strg + T instead of clicking on the “new tab” button: Same as above, start typing right after the new tab is opened.
• Press Strg + D instead of clicking on the star: Bookmarking is more comfortable this way.
• Press F5 instead of clicking on the reload button
• Press F3 for instant search instead of Edit > Search
• Press Strg + J instead of Extras > Downloads…
• Press Strg + B instead of View > Sidebar > Bookmarks

Want to learn more keyboard shortcuts? Head over to the Mozilla knowledgebase article!

Lazy Tip #3: Use FastestFox

The Firefox Add-On FastestFox is really a jewel. It combines so many Add-ons in one, making it the most powerful Add-on fore improving your efficiency on Firefox.

Downloading FastestFox and Configuring

Go to the Add-On page of FasterFox, download it and install it. Then hit the options of the Add-on.

On the General settings you may like to have a more easy copy and paste like in Linux and mIRC. Check “Auto copy selected” and “Paste on middle mouse click”.

Now copying is as easy as selecting a text and pasting as easy as pressing the middle mouse button.

You also may want to edit the items that show up on the pop-up bubble whenever you select a text. So click pop-up bubble on the FastestFox Options.

As I don’t use OneRiot and Twitter Search that often, I unchecked them. This leaves only Wikipedia (which is default) and Google in the pop-up bubble, thus cleaning it up.

Get Known To The Quick Launcher

The qLauncher makes it easy to open your favorite bookmarks in a instance. Just press Strg + Space and then hit the appropriate key to open your favorite site.

Additionally, you can hit space again to perform an inline search in the qLauncher and open the result directly from itself.

Want to add your favorite page? No problem! Just press Strg + Space on the desired page and then press the +  on the last button for your entry. Deleting is as easy as pressing the X.

Lazy Tip #4: Use Your URL Bar For Your Bookmarklets

Firefox has a feature which many don’t know about. You can assign keywords for bookmarks. E.g. you can assign the keyword tj to the bookmark TechJanitor.net. Now if you hit tj and enter in the URL Bar it will directly take you to TechJanitor.net instead of searching it on Google.

This can you save a lot of time if you use it properly.

To do assign a keyword to a bookmark simply right-click on the bookmark and then click Properties.

Then just type the keyword you want for your bookmark.

So, in my case I don’t only use it for bookmarks, but also for bookmarklets (which are those bookmarks, who execute some stuff to make your life easier). I love the readability bookmarklet (it really makes content more readable, thanks to the guys at the arc90 labs). But I hate to click always on the folder bookmarklets and navigate and so on – you get the picture.

So with the knowledge of 3 paragraphs above you might know now what I did – right! I assigned a keyword to the bookmarklet. Now all I have to do to execute the readability bookmarklet is: Press F6, type “r1″ and hit Enter! No use of mouse, just the keyboard. Pretty neat, huh?

Apply this to every bookmark or bookmarklet you like to give your Firefox the turbo it needed.

Lazy Tip #5: Perform Every Search From Your URL Bar

Another great, but mainly unknown, feature of Firefox is, that you can assign keywords for search engines. I use g for Google, w for Wikipedia, y for Yahoo and so on.

The difference to the method above is though that you perform a specific search by typing the keyword and then the search term. E.g. to search for cats on Google I would type “g cats” in my URL Bar, to search for Internet on Wikipedia “w Internet” and so on.

To access this click on the Google icon on your search panel and then click on “Manage search engines…”

Now you see a new window where your current search engines are listed.

Now click on the desired search engine and then edit keyword. Type your keyword and you’re done!

Conclusion

Sure there are many more ways to make your Firefox more efficient, but these tips are a good start to make you a more productive Firefoxer!

Anyways, do you’ve got an awesome tip to make the Firefox experience more efficient? Then feel free to add it below in the comments section!

After cleaning your computer and tuning your startup, in today’s issue we’ll order the files of your computer and bringing them back to order. And after this How-To you’ll will see how your computer speed increased dramtically (at least I hope so).

But now let’s get to the work!

File Those Messy Files (Defragmentation)

Now after doing some cleanup we want to order and file the useful and needed files that are left. This process is called defragmentation.

Imagine you have written a article of multiple pages, and one page is located at your desk drawer, the other at your DVD collection, the thirs page is in on the floor and the last one on the kitchen sink. Now if you want to read it, you have first to go through all the house to gather the pages and order them before actually reading them. What a loss of  time. This also happens when you edit files on your computer, one part of the file is located in sector A, the other in sector B and the last on sector XZ12.

By doing defragmentation we gather those parts together and file them properly in the hard disk.

But now let’s get started.

Which Of The 1,548,028 Programs Should I Use?

There are many disk defragmentation tools out there, in fact too many. So maybe staying at the Windows made tool would be a good option. But it isn’t the best. The readers of Lifehacker have voted for Defraggler as the best disk defragmenter. (By the way: It’s from the same software developers as CCleaner, so this is a bonus point.)

If you didn’t already head over the homepage of Defraggler and download it!

Getting Started

For the installation process the fourth screen is important, because there you must opt out to install the Yahoo! Toolbar (unless you REALLY want it).

After the installation is complete we have to start the program.

You are greeted by a  nice, clean interface.

Now be sure to hit Analyze for your hard drives to see how bad the defragmentation monster hit your hard drives.

After you’ve analyzed all hard drives you want to defrag those with the highest percentage of defragmentation.Now it would be better if you have some free time for defragging the hard drives. So the best option would be to start the defragmentation  before going to eat dinner or whatever and leave it running till the end.

Now repeat the process until you’ve got your fragmentation to zero on all hard drives.

There we are, all cleant up and filed. Feels good, doesn’t it?

Keeping It Clean For More Than Just One Week: Scheduling

So after you’ve defragged all to zero fragmentation you want to keep it that way. The best way to do this is to schedule the defrags.

To do this, head over to the Options and then click on the Schedule tab on the new window.

If you’ve got more than one hard drive, you’ll have to select all the drives you want to be defragged scheduled from the drop down menu. My approach on this is to cycle it weekly with each day for a particular drive. So C: is defragged every Wednesday, D: every Thursday, E: every Friday and so on. You get the idea.

You can schedule it daily or even monthly if the drive’s contents are changed very fast or very slowly. This depends on your usage.

That was all, it wasn’t that hard, was it?

And if it was, let me know it in the comments if you got problems or any other ideas. Also if you found grammatical errors or typo’s feel free to report to me, I appreciate it!

Stay tuned for the next part, which will be about final tweaks and further reading.

Photo credit goes to mukluk

In the previous part I’ve been talking about the reasons why computer slow down and tuning therefore the startup programs. In this lesson we’re going to clean the drawers (also known as hard-drives) of our desk (computer) and to file them properly (defragmentation) to make the PC working more efficiently.

Get Your Gloves On – It’s Time To Clean Up

So, are you ready to clean up your pc now? Good. We could do this manually for sure, but in fact this would take years, because many of the junk there on your pc is hidden in folder structures that go beyond 6 or 7 levels.

But fortunately there are some programs, that will do the job as well. I’ll focus here especially on the freeware CCleaner, which does his work at cleaning all the junk pretty well.

Installing CCleaner

If you didn’t have done it already go to the website and download the tool and start the setup.

Click Next and decide whethe you agree with the conditions or not.

When you hit the installing options, be aware if you do want to add CCleaner also to your recycle bin or have another toolbar you don’t need installed. So if your life doesn’t depend on that new toolbar I would recomment to not installing it. (We are here to clean up and not install more programs or toolbars we don’t need.)

After the installation is done, hit Finish to run CCleaner.

You are greeted by a simple interface with plenty of options where to locate the junk.

For beginnning, default settings do a pretty good job, but you may like to have a look at the specific browsers you use. Uncheck Cookies if you want to keep logged in at your favorite website and/or uncheck Internet History, if you want to keep the history of your internet activities (especially handy for me as I don’t use often bookmarks).

When you are satisfied with the settings, hit Analyze.

Now you see the approximate size of all the files that will be removed. For my first use this is a pretty good result, isn’t it? And I’m only using my operating system since a fresh install for a barely one month, so you may expect even higher results.

If you are happy with the analysis, hit Run Cleaner and wait for the magic to be done.

My PC is 710 MB lighter! If all diets would be so promising…

Now we want to free the Registry of junk and orphaned entries. So navigate to Registry in the left menu as show in the screenshot above.

In this view now first hit Scan for Issues and then after seeing all the unnecessary registry entries click on Fix selected issues… and you’ll be prompted if you want to backup those changes to the registry, which I strongly recommend! Only in case something doesn’t work anymore. So hit Yes and choose a location for backing up the changes.

Wait a moment and let the magic happen and woosh! Your registry has been cleaned up. If something does not work anymore or you feel sorry for all those registry entries you killed, you simply double click at the freshly created backup.reg file and all will be undone.

Photo credit goes to apesara

Note: This post is part of a series, so expect more posts about this topic.

How would be a world where computers don’t slow after time? No cleaning up or reinstalling a fresh Windows for having this charming speed you have after a fresh installation. But it isn’t as impossible as it seems, with a few tricks you can actually evoke some good results. But now let’s go to work.

Why Does My Computer Slow Down?

Think of your computer as a desk. Your hard drive are the drawers, your main memory is the desktop and your CPU are the workers working at this desk serving you your computer experience. Now after some time dealing with your desk your drawers get more filled. This is because you don’t file the files and programs properly and so they get messy and unorganized. In computer speak this is also called fragmentation.

You also don’t clean your desktop and so more and more things begin to clutter up there. The result is that the things you don’t need take away space from your desktop and detain you from working properly on your desktop. Speaking of your computer there are too many processes (things) using your RAM (desktop) thus the applications important for don’t get enough space to work properly.

All in all the workers (your CPU) keep on working but they get a hard time with the messy drawers and the cluttered desktop. The result is that they can’t work at their fastest pace so they get inefficient.

So What Can I Do Against It?

To become more faster you could simply upgrade your materials, buying a bigger hard drive (more drawers) or faster and bigger RAM (a bigger desk to work on) or engaging more productive workers (a new CPU). But we don’t want to spend more money on this, instead we eliminate the mess and the clutter that causes the slowing down of the computer.

Eliminate the desk clutter (tune your startup)

Now we want to eliminate all the unnecessary startup programs, but cleaning the Startup folder won’t do all the job. We want to see all the startup programs. To do that press Win key + R, enter “msconfig” and press enter.

Now you see the configuration service. Click on the tab Startup and you get a list of the actual startup programs.

So what we do really need? In fact it would be smart now, to enlarge the rows describing each Startup Item to see what it actually is.

Now we want to to know which of this startup items are actually important or unnecessary. In general we can say that important entries are the Anti-Virus programs, firewalls or drivers, so look for the keywords NVidia, ATI, antivirus, firewall, security before disabling them.

But let’s see now each item in detail.

• Adobe Acrobat
  In fact this is a preloader to speed up the startup time of Adobe Reader. You can safely disable this, but may let it activated if you use often Adobe Reader. Or consider switching to another PDF Reader.
• avast! Antivirus
  Now this is something important and here we don’t want to disable security. Keep it on.
• Google Update
  If you installed Google Chrome or other Google app this comes along with it. You can safely disable it, but may have to check new updates manually.
• GrooveMonitor Utility
  This is a part of Microsoft Groove, which is a part of Microsoft Office. If you don’t use it, disable it.
• iTunes
  This is also a  background application called iTunesHelper, you can safely disable it.
• Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U16
  This is also a background app, which is used for enhanced startup time of Java. Can be safely disabled.
• Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
  You may think now that this is the most essential and important to keep activated, but it is not! In fact this is only the sidebar/gadgets platform and therefore not the most important. So if you don’t use Gadgets or the Sidebar you can disable this too.
• QuickTime
  Again, this is a background application to enhance QuickTimes startup time and provide additional functionality. You know it already, you can safely deactivate it.
• Skype
  Your favourite VoIP-client. Starts up automatically so you don’t forget it. Decide whether you want a faster boot time or use it too often so it is more comfortable to leave it activated.
• Windows Live Messenger
  Apply the same procedure as for Skype.

Now after doing some decisions, we look at our Startup Items.

Looks much cleaner now, heh?

General Rules

• Leave it activated:
  • Security programs (anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware etc.)
  • Critical drivers (Graphic drivers, other driver applications you need)
• Depends on your usage
  • Messenger apps (if you use them regularly)
  • Application pre-loaders (like the Adobe Reader fast start and so on)
    If you use some applications very frequently it may be worth to leave it on autostart. It may slow down your startup time in general but will reduce it otherwise when you start the app.
• Can be safely deactivitated
  • Background applications, Agents (e.g. Winamp Agent, iTunesHelper, QuickTimeTask etc.)
  • Crap ware, toolbars or applications you don’t need (e.g. Smiley applications and similar)

When we are done, hit Apply and OK and the app will ask you if you want to restart now or restart later.

For now you can simply hit Exit without restart and restart later.

Stay Tuned For The Next Part

Now we’ve done some work, didn’t we? Time for relaxing, get yourself a drink or play a game.

In the next part I’ll show you how to clean up those messy drawers by cleaning up your files and deleting the junk. But make sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed, so you don’t miss any update!

If you liked the post, share the love by re-tweeting it or sharing it on any other social site. I would appreciate it!

If you have any questions, found an error or got a better way, feel free to say it in the comments.

The Tech Janitor is now getting ready for work and will serve you easy how-tos, cool links and the best applications for making your tech life easier.

Have fun with the upcoming posts and consider subscribing to the RSS Feed. If you are into Twitter, would it be nice if you follow me.

And if you have any tech-related question, feel free to contact me or post a comment. With a bit luck you’ll get your article on the blog.