Try rebooting, if you are having issues with your system. From the Start menu, select Shut Down, then choose Restart from the drop-down. To force a reboot when your operating system is frozen, hold down the power button for 5 to 10 seconds, until the power is off. After the system is powered down, press the power button again to restart.

Check to see that the device is still connected to the PC. With USB connections, you can also try to plug the keyboard or mouse into another USB port. It doesn't matter which port you use, since the USB ports are configured the same.

Get internet connectivity first. Launch Internet Explorer and attempt to connect to the General Assembly site. With internet connectivity, you can access the web-based resources that DLAS provides such as its web-enabled systems and DLAS network file and print services.

Sometimes text size on a Web page is fixed to preserve certain design features. In this case, you will be unable to use the View > Text Size menu option in Internet Explorer to change the size of the text. However, you can zoom in on the page using the browser zoom feature. Browser zoom magnifies text, and all the other elements on the page as well.

To zoom in or out on a Web page, click the magnifying glass icon at the bottom right corner of the Internet Explorer window or Press CTRL + PLUS SIGN (+) to zoom in, or CTRL + HYPHEN (-) to zoom out. CTRL + 0 returns the text back to its normal size.

Note: Internet Explorer shows the current zoom percentage in the bottom right of the status bar and opens the zoom options when you click the button to the right of the number.

Enter full screen mode in Internet Explorer to hide browser controls and see more of the web page. This is useful when you are using the site's own navigation controls and you don't need to access the browser controls.

Press F11 or click View > Full Screen to switch to full-screen mode. Press F11 again to return to the normal view.

Web pages sometimes use print style sheets to prevent certain page areas from printing. When printing a Web page, the print preview function lets you see exactly what you will be printing. The print preview window offers several additional benefits. For example, you can adjust the scale from "shrink to fit" to any percentage of the original size and adjust print margins.

To open a print preview window in Internet Explorer, select Print Preview from the File menu.

There are several file formats to choose from when saving an image. Your requirements for the image determine which format you should use.

• JPEG is named after the “Joint Photographic Experts Group“ who created the standard and is best used when saving photographs since it can support a wide range of color.
• GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, is an image format that uses a palette of up to 256 individual colors, making it great for web graphics that don’t use a wide range of colors such as logos.
• PNG, or Portable Network Graphics, are similar to a GIF, except they support a much greater number of colors and can also support alpha transparency channels as opposed to single transparent pixels. Please note that IE6 does not fully support PNG-transparency.

It is best to use JPEGs when saving photographic images, GIFs when saving files that have a small range of color, such as logos (even if the background needs to be transparent) and PNGs can be used when your file has more than 256 colors and also needs alpha transparency such as files with 50% color screening or drop shadows.

Make sure your online PDFs have meaningful titles in the PDF Properties dialog. Google Search uses the title in the Properties dialog as the result snippet title when returning PDFs.

To add title metadata to your PDF, right-click the PDF in Windows Explorer and select Properties. In the PDF tab, enter your title in the Title field. Also, make sure the Title metadata is applied to your source document. This way, each time you generate your PDF, the Title from your source document will be applied to the PDF as well. For example, if your PDF source is a Word doc, open the document in Microsoft Word, and from the File menu select Properties. In the Title field of the Summary tab of the Document Properties dialog, enter your document title metadata.

To quickly access your Windows desktop, without having to minimize each of the open windows, use this shortcut - windows key + m

Windows XP includes a visual technology called "ClearType" to increase windows text readability. To turn on this feature, right-click on your desktop, click "Properties > Display Properties > Appearance" tab. Click "Effects" and in the drop-down labeled "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts", select "ClearType". Click OK twice.

Use internet file naming standards to increase the options you have for sharing files.

Use lower case letters and underscores

Filenames and folders are case sensitive. They should be in lowercase and not include spaces to ensure they work on all systems. Filenames and folder names should have no spaces between words. Spaces between words and letter display as %20 in browsers. Instead use _ (underscore). To make an underscore press SHIFT and then the – key (between the 0 and = on your keyboard).

Do not use any special characters such as %, ! or ?.

Keep your names short, succinct and meaningful.

The longer the filename, the longer the URL. Long URL’s are hard to read, type or write, and wrap and break when pasted into emails. Example: "va_capitol.pdf" instead of "Virginia Capitol.pdf"

In Microsoft Word, use styles and templates to create and apply formatting. Styles allow you to make targeted changes throughout a document, something you can't do when you override the normal style with inline styling. Spend the time initially to develop a set of styles that represent the different text formatting you will need in the document. Use templates to save your styles. Similarly, use paragraph formats in FrameMaker, so you can make changes through global update options.

Changing printers in Word or another what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor can change the formatting of your document, and hard page breaks might not occur where you had intended. Keeping this in mind, instead of hard page breaks, use the keep with next option for the paragraph style. You can access this option from the Format menu in Word 2003. Use the Line and Page breaks tab on the Paragraph dialog to set the keep with next option.

Special characters are symbols that do not appear on the Windows keyboard. Word divides special characters into two groups, symbols and special characters. Some special characters like the copyright symbol, are in the Symbol dialog box, which you can access from by selecting Symbol from the Insert menu. Other special characters can be found on the Special Character tab. This is where you can find the section symbol.

If you need to export your Word source material to another application, the RTF format is a good choice for the transitional file format. The importing application uses a filter to import the RTF file, preserving as much of the native formatting as possible while enabling formatting in the new publishing environment.