Below are some useful windows Keyboard Shortcuts that would help you complete your tasks faster using keyboard rather than using the mouse.

1. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “d” simultaneously to minimize all the windows.
2. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “e” simultaneously to open up windows explorer.
3. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “f” simultaneously to open up the search dialog.
4. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “l” simultaneously to lock the computer.
5. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “m” simultaneously to minimize all the windows. This is the same as pressing Windows + d as in 1 above.
6. Press the “Windows Key” and the letter “r” simultaneously to bring up the run programs dialog.  This is really convenient in Vista since it does not have the shortcut to open the run dialog in the start menu anymore.
7. Press the “Alt” key with Tab to cycle through all open programs.
8. Ofcourse, most of your will be aware of the keys to cut (Ctrl+x), copy (Ctrl+c) and paste (Ctrl+v) text.
9. To capture screenshot of the current window, press “Alt+Prnt Scrn key”.  To capture contents of your entire screen, press Prnt Scrn key.  You can then paste the content to mspaint to see the picture as a bmp.
10. Press “Ctrl+Shift+Esc” simultaneously to bring up the task manager window.  You can also get here by pressing “Ctrl + Alt+Del” keys.
11. Press Ctrl+Esc to open up the start menu, you can also do this by pressing just the windows key.

I will be covering the usage of the function keys in a separate post.

Automatically resize columns in Windows Explorer

If you regularly use Explorer’s Details view, here’s a convenient keyboard shortcut you should know about. After opening an Explorer window in Details view, hold down the Ctrl key and press the Plus (+) key on the numeric keypad. This shortcut instantly and automatically resizes each column based on the width of the longest entry in that column, so you can see all the file details.  Please note that this works only for regular external keyboards and does not work with laptops.