Washington - Run across a web page you don't want to forget? In Windows Internet Explorer, you can quickly place a shortcut to it on your desktop by right-clicking inside the page and selecting "Create Shortcut" from the pop-up menu. Creating shortcuts this way is browser-independent, as opposed to creating shortcuts using a Favourites or Bookmarks menu.

Washington - Need to copy exactly what you see on your computer monitor? Just press the Print Screen button on your keyboard. Doing so sends a graphical image of the contents of your desktop to the Windows clipboard. Press Alt-Print Screen to capture an image of just the foreground application. Once the image is in the clipboard, you can paste it into a paint program for further editing.

Washington - Want to find out whether your PC is up to the task of running Windows 7? Download Microsoft's free Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor (http://tinyurl.com/yfz3kzd). The tool takes an inventory of your hardware, peripherals, and software and provides you with a report of what will work and what will not. The tool works on Windows XP and Vista.

Washington - When something goes wrong during the burning of a CD or DVD disk, the result is almost always an unusable disk. Avoid this problem by not doing anything else with your computer while a CD or DVD is being written to. Using other programs while writing to a disk can interfere with the burning process.

Washington - In Windows XP and later versions of Windows, you can view the contents of compressed (zipped) files simply by double-clicking the file names. Don't be fooled, though: you'll need to highlight and extract the files in order for them to show up as individual files in the directory of your choice. Double-clicking a compressed file does not actually extract its contents. (dpa)