One of the tragic side-effects of large, cheap hard drives is that even with the best of organization skills it’s quite easy to misplace stuff you’ve downloaded on your system. Like a specific picture, file, document or what have you. Oh sure you can search for the misplaced file, but what if you forgot what you named it? How the kelp are you supposed to find it?

The easiest way to locate the misplaced bugger is to use your browser’s download history.

What’s that? Your browser doesn’t have a history of all the files you’ve downloaded, like Internet Explorer? Didn’t your parents ever tell you NOT to use a browser that didn’t keep track of what you downloaded? Well they damned well should have!

Browsers like Seamonkey *yay!* and Firefox *ack ptuey!* keep track of all downloaded files quite easily. The files are named what you named them and are listed by date and time, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Even if you forgot what you named it.

Let’s say for example that a certain blogger, who will not be named here, started some stupid tech version of the Julie/Julia project. A challenge to himself to commit to posting 365 entries on his blog in a year that were worth the geek-read.

Sure sounds stupid, but let’s continue shall we? Let’s say one day he decides to post about how to Make The Ultra-Coolest Wallpaper Ever and forgets where he put that cool pic of a Tie-fighter. He doesn’t remember what he called it but is reasonably sure it had tie in it, so he heads on over to his browser’s download manager and sorts the entries by name. And starts with T, hoping against hope it started with Tie.

Now that he knows what it’s called he searches for Tie Fighter.jpg and locates it on his hard drive with ease so he can make yet another geek-worthy post. It was in a directory called Bad Examples To Use for Download History Post Because The File Is Named A Name He Could Have Just Searched For. But who cares, now you see why using a browser that keeps track of what you download can come in handy. The world is saved, the file is located AND now you know it’s time to switch browsers.

Hurray!

Another great tip: you can use the download history to try to find a file you’re looking for and if you don’t manage to locate it on your hard drive you can easily re-download it by right clicking the file and selecting one of two options: The Go to download option takes you to the page you were on that had the file you downloaded and the Copy download link option places the exact link of the download to your clipboard so you can paste it into your browser to directly download the needed file.

Double Hurray!

What’s that? Your browser doesn’t have those options either? Time to switch browsers then!

Triple Hurray! With a triple axle sow cow/salchow (Winter Olympics pun.)