Netbook Crazy

Netbooks are designed for ultra portability. They are lightweight and can be carried around with so much convenience. But with the portable size comes one minor kink—a small screen that’s quite hard to view. This can prove to be a bit of a hassle for users who are reading documents or spreadsheets on their mini laptops. The small screen can strain your eyes and even cause headache. But fortunately, there are ways to maximize the viewable area of your netbook.

Here’s one trick to make your screen appear larger: enable the auto-hide feature of your netbook’s taskbar. To do that, right click on your taskbar and click Properties. Then check the “Auto-hide the taskbar” box. If you’re using Microsoft Office 2007, you can use the hotkey Ctrl+F1 that switches between the show or hide feature of the toolbar. This boosts the viewability of Word documents on the LCD screen of your netbook.

For Internet browsing, you can take advantage of the Google Chrome browser that gives an optimized viewable browsing area. However, if you’re hesitant to download Google Chrome because of its bugs and incompatibility issues, then you can simply press F11 to switch between viewability modes. This trick works for both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.