From The Tips Box: Android Ringer Volume, Dropbox On Windows

Readers offer their best tips for changing Android’s ringer volume, accessing your Dropbox on Windows, and buying the best graphics card for your money.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons — maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in — the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Adjust Ringer Volume Without Unlocking Your Android Phone

Shamowfski discovers a little trick for changing the ringer volume in Android:

Wake up your screen. Press and hold power button to bring up shutdown menu, then use volume rockers to adjust the ringer volume. You won’t see the volume indicator on the screen, but you can hear it changing.

I can silence my phone from the lock screen, but before figuring this out, I couldn’t adjust the volume (at least not with a stock lock screen).

Double-Click the Dropbox Icon for Quick Dropbox Access

PrMn shares a quick shortcut for Windows users:

A quick sort of tiplet for Dropbox users on Win7. When you have the client up and running, a tap or double tap of DB’s icon in the Taskbar will open your local DB folder. Handy, imo.

Of course you can right-click the icon in the notification area and get the same thing done, but this is a tiny bit faster. A ‘tiny bit’ matters more than ever these days, for people like me who’d prefer to have things yesterday, but can’t.

Compare Power Usage when Buying Graphics Cards

Photo by Andy Melton.

TheFu reminds us of another important factor in buying a graphics card:

Buyers may also want to check the power use for each card. I was comparing 2 cards which had similar performance, but the power used for 1 was almost double that of the other. I’m usually not power sensitive unless it gets crazy, but in this case, paying $US5 more for 50W less used power seemed like a bargain.