Blogs are all the rage because they provide a constantly updated source of information on thousands of different topics, and people love fresh info. Keeping up with your favorite blogs can waste hours every day, though.

You can stay more informed (or entertained) by reading more blogs. To do it without wasting your life in front of a computer, use an RSS reader than aggregates your blogs. This is built into Internet Explorer and most browsers, but I wouldn’t recommend that–I find it slow and clumsy, and I don’t know the point of reading one blog at a time.

I use Google Reader to view dozens of blogs at once. It keeps track of which entries I’ve looked at, and only shows me the new stuff. I can flip through hundreds of entries in just a few minutes to find the ones that really interest me (I always use the All items link in the upper-left corner). Pictures and instructions after the break…

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You can group files in Explorer to make them easier to browse. This is especially useful for pictures. Let’s say you want to find a picture you took last week, but you took an awful lot of pictures. Hover your cursor over the Date taken heading, and then click the down-arrow. Then, click Group. You can also right-click the folder, click Group By, and then click Date modified.

Windows Vista groups your files by date. Now, you can also manage them using that grouping. Click the down-arrow to collapse a group, and click it again to expand it. Click the line itself to select the entire group so you can easily delete or move the files.

If you have too many files in a folder, or in search results, you can quickly narrow it down if you know when the file approximate date the file was modified.
In Explorer, hover your cursor over the Date Modified column. When the down-arrow appears, click it. Then, select the date ranges you want to see. Windows Vista filters the display to show only the files or folders in the selected range.

You can do this for any of the columns–Type and Date are also very useful.

To quickly pull up a calendar, just click the clock on the Windows Vista taskbar. You can also put a calendar on your Sidebar, but why waste the space?

If you’re the only user of your computer, and you don’t have to worry about other people sitting at your computer and reading your e-mail or abusing your account, you might want it to automatically log you on each time the computer starts.

You can do this using the registry, but it requires you to put your password in plain text, where someone might be able to find it. Here’s a better way: the AutoLogon.exe tool provided by the Microsoft Shell developers. It’s not officially supported, but it’ll do the job. Instructions after the break.

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To quickly copy the full path of a file to your clipboard, hold down the Shift key, right click a file, and then click Copy as Path. The full path to the file is placed on your clipboard.

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I discovered this trick while looking in my referrer logs. Steve Clayton clues us in that clicking the scroll wheel shows full-screen tiles of all your windows. I like it even better than Alt-Tab. Now, if they would just make it work with multiple monitors…