The default action for the Power button on the start menu in Windows Vista is Sleep, which isn’t necessarily useful for everybody. You can configure this setting easily by using the advanced power settings panel, which is a little tricky to get to normally, but we’ll take the shortcut. Open a command prompt (type cmd into [...]

If you’ve ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you’ve found the right article. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak. What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu (I [...]

Whether you are doing graphics/web design work or just taking screenshots, it’s often very difficult to move the mouse precisely enough to select pixels the way you’d like, so I went looking for a solution. There’s a number of methods you can use, from configuring the default mouse settings, to enabling Mouse Keys to move [...]

If you’ve ever hooked up your laptop to a secondary monitor and then disconnected without remembering to move the windows back to the primary desktop, you’ve probably encounted this problem: The application is running. You can see it in the taskbar, but you can’t see it on the screen, because it still thinks it’s running [...]

Windows Vista uses large icons by default in the start menu, and it hides the setting for small icons pretty well. No matter, we’ve located it. Right click on the start button, and select Properties: Then click the Customize button: Now scroll down all the way to the bottom. You should see a checkbox for Use [...]

Have you ever noticed that the File Types option was completely removed from Vista, and there’s no built-in way to change the editor for many file types? Sure, you can change the default application used to open the file, but you can’t change what happens when you right-click / edit. You can either directly hack [...]

If you find yourself using the Group Policy Editor all the time, you might have wondered why it doesn’t show up in the Control Panel along with all the other tools. After many hours of registry hacking, I’ve come up with a registry tweak to let you do just that. You can’t manually make the [...]

It’s always struck me as odd that system tweakers use the registry editor all the time to fix annoyances in Windows, but nobody has created a tweak to add the registry editor to the control panel… until now. I’ve created a registry hack to add the registry editor as another option in the Control Panel [...]

If you’ve ever tried to copy a file that is locked by another application, you’ve probably seen an error message similar to “The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file”. So how do you copy it anyway? Since XP, Windows has supported a technology called Volume Shadow [...]

This is another installment in using the Parental Controls feature in Vista.  I figured this week I would cover these controls and other utilities we can use to help protect the kids.  At the end of this week or beginning of next I will put together everything and do one comprehensive article that covers everything.  [...]

The “Run” line in the Start menu can be used to speed up access to a whole variety of functions. Some examples of the shortcuts that are available are discussed here. Introduction to the Run Line The Run command line may be one of the least utilized functions in the Start menu. This is a [...]

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1.> OPEN NOTEPAD 2.> COPY AND PASTE THE CODE GIVEN BELOW 3.> SAVE IT AS “Add Licence To Your Windows.reg”. WHERE YOUR MEDIA PLAYER INSTALLER IS LOCATED. 4.> THEN MERGE IT WITH INSTALLER BY DOUBLE CLICKING IT. 5.> WHEN YOU INSTALL IT ASK YOU ABOUT VALIDATION JUST CLICK ON “VALIDATE”. IT ALLOWS YOU TO GO [...]

Using USB Disk Ejector from the GUI This utility is really quite slick… launch it and then either double-click or press enter on the usb device you’d like to eject. There’s literally nothing else to it. If you assign a hotkey to the executable through a shortcut, you can operate the entire thing from your [...]

There’s a number of ways to accomplish this, one of the way is to use the NirCmd utility from the excellent Nirsoft. It does a lot more than just eject the cd-rom drive, so be sure to read the information on their site about all the capabilities. Create a Shortcut to Eject the CD/DVD Drive [...]

If you are the type of person that never uses any applications in the system tray, you might be interested in this registry hack to turn it off entirely. I can’t imagine using my own system this way, but we’re all about providing information. Note that you could also use this in reverse… if your [...]

Many utilities need to be run as administrator in order to function properly, especially older utilities that haven’t been updated to support Vista yet. All shortcuts in Windows Vista have a special property that you can set that will allow the application to run as Administrator. This works perfectly for creating a batch file to restart [...]

Normally when you want to access the Disk Cleanup tool, you usually have to either find it through the start menu, or open up the drive properties window. Instead of going through all that, we can use a simple registry hack to add a menu item to the drive right-click menu. Using the Hack After [...]

After manually applying or downloading the hack, you’ll have a new item on the right-click menu for your drives… Which will start up the command-line version of Disk Defragmenter (after accepting the UAC prompt) Manual Registry Hack Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following [...]

Step 1: Browse to the Registry Key The first thing you’ll want to do is open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell The screen should look similar to this one if you are in the right place. Step 2: Create the Menu [...]