Page 12      Diablo Blue    May, 2002

Bruce Feld sent me an email message recently telling about www.vivisimo.com, a great new search engine. It uses a three-frame page design that keeps important things on screen at all times. There are several things that I particularly like about Vivisimo:

1.        You enter your search string in the top frame.

2.        Search results are shown in the right frame.

3.        It groups categories of search results in the left frame.

4.        Sites open in the right frame or, if you want, in another window.

5.        There’s a box at the bottom left for entering a string that will be used to search within the results.

6.        Clicking “More results” adds additional sites to the bottom of the current list in the right frame, instead of moving you to a new page with the “next 10” or whatever search results.

Give it at try at www.vivisimo.com. It probably won’t replace Google in your search engine bag of tricks, but I think you’ll like it as a powerful alternative.

Creating a Desktop Shortcut to Lock a Windows XP PC

To create a desktop shortcut that will let you lock your PC whenever you are going to step away from your desk:

1.        Right-click an empty area of the desktop, select New and Shortcut from the pop-up menu.

2.        In the Create Shortcut Wizard dialog box type:
%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation in the Type the location of the item box, and then click Next. LockWorkStation is case sensitive.

3.        In the “Type a name for this shortcut” dialog box, type Lock Workstation in the Type a name for this shortcut box, and then click the Finish button.

4.        Right-click the shortcut you just made, and then click Properties from the pop-up menu.

5.        Click the Shortcut tab, and then click the Change Icon button.

6.        In the Change Icon dialog box, type %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll in the Look for icons in this file box, and then click the OK button.

7.        Browse through the available icons, and then select an icon that makes it easy for the users to identify that the shortcut is to be used to lock the workstation. Click the icon you want to use, and then click OK .

8.        Click OK .

Double-click the shortcut, and note that the workstation will automatically lock itself.

The user must press CTRL-ALT-DEL and then enter their password (and their user name if the copy of Windows XP is connected to a Windows domain or is configured to use the classic [Windows 2000] interface) to unlock the workstation.