Here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts for Windows 8. Many have been in Windows for years, but there are a bunch of new ones, too. Note the increased use of the Windows logo key. (Credit: Windows team blog)

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There are several ways of capturing the screen using tools built into Microsoft Office 2010 programs. My favorite — and most flexible — method is using OneNote. Watch my video to see how you can take a picture of what’s on the screen and paste it into a document. (For full HD size, watch it on YouTube).

Video: a laptop that is completely powered off will boot to the desktop in about 8 seconds.

Yesterday, Microsoft gave 5,000 tablets running an alpha version of Windows 8 to developers at its annual conference. It has cool, multi-touch features and a completely redesigned Start menu. It’s aimed squarely at competing with the iPad. The earliest it will be available for purchase is the middle of next year.

Here is a list of all shortcuts using the Windows logo key on your keyboard ( ), courtesy of Tech Republic. They did a pretty good job with this by listing all of them, not just the common ones. Note that some of them work only in Windows 7.

If you play a lot of media files from different sources, or go to web sites off the beaten path that have video and sound that you want to play, you might get an error that you don’t have the necessary codec to play the file. What does that mean, and what do you do?

First: a codec is a program that encodes and decodes sound and video files. Hence the word COder DECoder. In the old days (when I used to configure video conferencing systems in the 1980s), codecs were expensive hardware devices. These days, they’re little programs that run on your computer behind the scenes, but Windows still considers them to be hardware. That’s why they’re listed in the Device Manager screen in System Properties.

Windows Media Player should download codecs automatically, when needed. If it doesn’t find what you need, you can search for codecs at Microsoft’s download center. Codecs are also available from other well-known publishers, like Adobe, Apple and others. Or if you know the FourCC number of the codec you need, you can Google it.

But downloading codec packs is a very bad idea. Codec packs are collections of many codecs bundled together, so — in theory — you don’t have to hunt for them individually. There are a lot of them around and most are free, but many codecs in these packs tend not to be properly tested, and this causes system instability that can be hard to diagnose and fix. You might get the short term benefit of being able to play a video, but the longer term headaches often aren’t worth it. Download codecs only from known, trusted sources. These should be digitally signed by the manufacturer.