In computer news this week:

Lead: Who shut the window, or How do I open up my new window full size again?

Probably the most common Internet surfing tip that can really speed up your browsing is using your mouse to right click on a hyperlink you see on a page, and then selecting Open in New Window from the popup menu you see. This is particularly helpful when you feel you might want to return to the page you have just clicked from, as when there are several things to click on a page you just found, and you feel you might want to return to this page again, and perhaps bookmark it.

When you are on a web page and click on a link using your right mouse button, and then select open in new window, you go to that new page, while the original page you clicked on stays open also, and you can see the icons for both pages at the bottom of your screen. Then if you do this again on the next page you are on, you will open up a 3rd window. Now you can instantly switch between all 3 windows just by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the screen for each window. You can of course keep opening up new windows in this manner also.

The advantage to doing this is that the pages don't have to slowly load again. If you want to return to the page you started from, you can just close both of the new windows you opened. Instead of the original page having to completely reload, which can slow you down, the page is already there - you never closed it.

Once you get into the habit of doing this, you can significantly increase the speed of your web surfing and of your information retrieval, and you will be very happy.

Until one day you run into one of the things that go bump in the night and daytime too on the internet. It can be anything, maybe an email from a friend directing you to a website that they think is cool, and there may be a lot of popup windows that you have to close, and you even may have to log off the internet and log back on again to return to normality.

Whatever, as soon as you do, when you get to a page that you want to right click on something and open it in a new window - you find that when you do this - it opens up in a tiny or smaller window - not the nice full size one you are used to - and you have to click on it to make it fullsize. And you have to do this every time on each new window, and you have lost your nice fullscreen new window size, and you wish you knew how to restore it again.

Here's the simple way to fix this problem.

1. Open IE .

2. Open a new window by right clicking on a link, and it will open up in that tiny window.

3. Use your mouse to stretch this window to full screen size by grabbing the top, bottom, left and right borders and pulling them so that the windows fills the screen like your regular Explorer window.

4. Switch back into your first window and close it by clicking on the X at the top right corner of the screen.

5. You will now be switched into the new window that you just stretched to fullsize. Hold down the shift key and close this window by clicking on the X at the top right corner of the screen.

The next time you open explorer, and right click to open a new window, you should now have your nice full size new window again. Remember this trick for the next time some spammer or website spoils your surfing fun again.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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