OUTLOOK Customise your ‘new email’ notifications

By default, a few things will happen on your PC when you receive a new email in the Outlook program. You’ll hear a ping and your cursor will briefly change to a mail icon. You will also see a desktop alert in your PC’S notification area. This remains on screen for a few seconds before fading away. If you don’t click this alert to read your email, you’ll see an envelope icon in your taskbar indicating that you have new mail.

All this can seem a bit over the top, but you can customise these alerts to remove any you don’t want.

To do this, open Outlook, click the File tab at the top left, Options at the bottom, then click Mail at the top left and scroll to the ‘Message arrival’ section. Here, you’ll see four boxes that are all ticked by default. Untick the relevant boxes to stop the notification sound, your cursor transformation, the taskbar envelope icon and the desktop alert.

To change how long the desktop alert appears for and its transparency level, click the Desktop Alert Settings button (see screenshot), then adjust both values using the sliders.

Click Preview to see the effects of your new settings, then click OK twice to confirm your changes.

Bookmark favourite web videos

If you like to watch videos on the web – and who doesn’t? – then Myvidster’s Video Bookmarks for Firefox and Chrome ( www.myvidster.com) is the perfect add-on for you. It lets you bookmark videos from any site, then edit the title and description, add tags, and choose a thumbnail to represent it.

You can create several channels to store your bookmarked videos in, and make them public or private. You need to sign up for a free account to use the service. You can also – in theory – download a copy of each video in MP4 format, but we’ve found clicking the button to do so always brings up a message about maximum downloads having been reached, and recommends you upgrade to Pro (for $5.99 a month) to bypass this.