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Showing posts with label Windows Vista Tricks. Show all posts

5 Great Registry Hacks

1. Security:

USB Drives are one of the major tool through which data transfer takes place. In order to protect your data from getting stolen from you computer with the help of a USB drive you can make the USB drives read only.

Go to ‘HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies‘ and create a new DWORD value ‘WriteProtect‘ and set its value to 1. This will enable you to read from USB drives, but you won’t be able to copy data to it.

2. Sorting Files:

Quite often you want the files to appear according to their names in explorer. In order to restore the ASCII file ordering, perform the following hack :

Go to ‘HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Policies\Explorer’ and create a new DWORD value called as ‘NoStrCmpLogical’ and set its value to 1.

3. Speeding Up Menu loading time:

In order to make your menus load faster, perform the following tweak.

Go to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Control Panel\Desktop‘ and right click ‘MenuShowDelay’ and click ‘Modify’. Change the string value to some nearby 100 value.

4. Reducing Folder Accessibility Time:

To speed up the access to any folder that is pinned to start menu, perform the following hack

Go to ‘HKCR\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers’ and right click ‘ContextMenuHandlers‘ and click ‘New|Key‘. Type ” (blank space and no quotation marks) and press Enter. Select any folder and right click on it to select ‘Pin to Start Menu’ while holding Shift key.

5. Multiple Logins in Messenger:

By default you are allowed only a single login at a time on Live Windows Messenger. You can override this by

Go to ‘HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsLive\Messenger’ and create a new DWORD value ‘Multiple Instances’ and its values as 1.

Free Software to Make your Windows Look 3D: T3Desk

T3Desk is a cool application where you can minimize or ’3Dmize’ your computer applications on your desktop where they would appear as semi- transparent windows in a 3D view. You can minimize any application window to appear as 3D window on your desktop. So, even though lot of windows might be open at the same time, they won’t take a lot of space because of this ingenious layout.

Earlier we had reviewed Fences, an interesting software to organize your desktop. T3Desk presents a completely different perspective. I am sure you don’t want to miss this new 3D experience on your desktop which lets you zoom, flip and move the applications the way you want to. You must have felt tired of opening up so many windows and then doing your work which consumes a lot of time. Here is this amazing utility which can be customized the way you want.

Here is a small video tutorial that explains how to use T3Desk.

It is a light weight resource where you can set your options for sound effects, zoom features, display, hot keys, transition effects, transparency effects, animation and the 3D initial angle.

Here are some of the features of this 3D Desktop

It works on windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP/VISTA and later versions
You can customize the effects the way you want to
The application appears in a 3Dmized window in 3 dimensions in a semi-transparent way
It is a light weight resource and works easily
The applications minimized appears in a T3 taskbar icon and are grouped together

Overall its an amazing software where all your applications appear in a thumbnail view. Its an amazing application with a 3D view. Moreover, it saves your efforts and increases productivity and focus and makes you more efficient. This is a very easy to use software to organize your desktop, and completely free

Top 10 Tips To Improve System Speed

1.Let your PC boot up completely before opening any applications.
2.Refresh the desktop after closing any application. This will remove any unused files from the RAM.
3.Do not set very large file size images as your wallpaper. Do not keep a wallpaper at all if your PC is low on RAM (less than 64 MB).
4.Do not clutter your Desktop with a lot of shortcuts. Each shortcut on the desktop uses up to 500 bytes of RAM
5.Empty the recycle bin regularly. The files are not really deleted from your hard drive until you empty the recycle bin.
6.Delete the temporary internet files regularly.
7.Defragment your hard drive once every two months. This will free up a lot of space on your hard drive and rearrange the files so that your applications run faster.
8.Always make two partitions in your hard drive. Install all large Softwares (like PSP, Photoshop, 3DS Max etc) in the second partition. Windows uses all the available empty space in C drive as virtual memory when your Computer RAM is full. Keep the C Drive as empty as possible.
9.When installing new Softwares disable the option of having a tray icon. The tray icons use up available RAM, and also slow down the booting of your PC. Also disable the option of starting
the application automatically when the PC boots. You can disable these options later on also from the Tools or preferences menu in your application.
10. Protect your PC from dust. Dust causes the CPU cooling fan to jam and slow down thereby gradually heating your CPU and affecting the processing speed. Use compressed air to blow out any dust from the CPU. Never use vacuum. RAM IS THE WORKING AREA
(DESKTOP) OF THE CPU, KEEP IT AS EMPTY AND
UNCLUTTERED AS POSSIBLE!

Hide Shutdown Menu !!!

This tip is very interesting for home and some small office users, who wants to restrict user's ability to shutdown their computer. You can hide the Shutdown button from the Start menu using registry editor and also restrict access to shutdown, if a user clicks on Ctrl+Alt+Del.

Follow the given steps to hide system shutdown button from start menu:

To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with

administrative rights.

Click Start button and type regedit in Run option then press Enter for next.

Here locate the location to:

Here in right side panel, right click to create a new DWORD value with name NoClose.

Now assign number 1 to its value data box.

Now close the registry editor and restart your computer after any changes to go into effect.

But next time, if you want to unhide the shutdown button then simply change the value data box to 0 or delete this DWORD item.

Again close the registry editor and restart your computer after any changes to go into effect.

Hide all drives from My Computer

This is a great trick you can play on your friends. To disable the display of local or networked drives when you click My Computer.

1. Go to Start -> Run.
Type regedit
2. Now go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
3. Now in the right pane, create a new DWORD item and name it NoDrives (it is case sensitive).
4. Now modify it's value and set it to 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal) .
5. Now restart your computer.
6. So, now when you click on My Computer, no drives will be shown(all gone...).

To enable display of drives in My Computer, simply delete this DWORD item that you created. Again restart your computer. You can now see all the drives again. Magic.......

AutomatiC ShuTdowN Trick!

Scare Your Friend With Auto Shutdown !!!

Read the following :
[1] Right click on desktop>select New>shortcut
[2] In the shortcut window type : shutdown -s -t 60 -c "the message you want to display"
[3] Select Next
[4] Name it anything.

Now, double click it !

Scared ???

Nothing happened !

Remedy :
[1] Go to start>Run
[2] Type : shutdown -a
[3] Hit Enter

Oh! You are rescued :)

Access Your Folders as Drive !

Well, this is my EXCLUSIVE !!!
Trick is all About :
You can create Virtual Drives in your Computer. Now you can access your Favorite Folders as a drive in My Computer.

What you can do ?
** Access your folders as a Drive !
** Fool 'Computer Beginners' or your 'Friends' (Non-Expert) , as the drive will show Disk Space of the folder's drive so it seems that the disk space has increased !!!

Do The Follwing :
► Start >> Run
► Type cmd and hit Enter
► This will open "Command Prompt"
► Type subst Z: E:\folder and hit Enter key.
→ You can replace Z: with your desired New Drive Letter (Except existing Drive letters)!
→ You can replace E:\folder with the path of your favorite folder !
► Now, type exit

*** This creates a new drive ! When you open this , it will open your folder !!!
*** Isn't it Awesome ?
*** And this is Exclusive at earnandtips.blogspot.com !
------------------------------------
But a Problem !
۩ On Restart the Virtual Drive Disappears !!!
----------------------------------

Solution !
----------------------------------
۩ We can make a batch file which will make the drive everytime on startup !
Here is how ?
► Open Notepad
► Type :
@ECHO OFF
subst Z: E:\folder
exit
► File >> Save As...
► Name it : Virtual Drive Emulator.bat
► Start >> All Programs
► Right Click on Startup >> Open
► This open the Startup folder
► Paste the Virtual Drive Emulator.bat file here !
*** That's all , now the drive will automatically be created when ever you start your pc

Changing the Title on Windows Media Player

you can change the title bar for the Windows Media Player

1. Start Regedit

2. Go to HKEY_USERS \ .DEFAULT \ Software \ Policies \ Microsoft \ WindowsMediaPlayer

3. Create a string value of TitleBar

4. Give it a value of whatever you want to appear in the title bar

Speed Up SATA Hard Drives & USB Drives in WindowsVista

Window Vista has built in support for SATA and external drives, but they seem to be slow because the advanced write cache features aren’t automatically activated. With just few steps you can enable them and get a much faster response.

First you need to go to the Device Manager which you can go directly by just typing device in the start menu search box or just type in devmgmt.msc in command line.

Now open the Disk drives section and right click on your hard drive. Now click on the Policies tab and you’ll find this dialog box:

Now click the checkbox for Enable advanced performance, and you are done.

Write caching isn’t enabled by default as removing devices directly without using the “Safely remove removable device”may lose your data, so be cautious when enabling this options. But enabling this option also when speeding up performance significantly when writing to the disk.

Now select the external drive and double click it to open up the properties screen. Then
just change the setting to “Optimize for performance” and hit OK to continue. You’ll have to reboot for all the settings to take effect. Next time you boot into Windows Vista you’ll see faster bootup times and better disk writing performance.

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