PC Tips for Quick cures for the worst Windows 7 annoyances

If you find yourself tripping over new Windows 7 features or missing favorite old ones, I’ve got some tips that will come to your rescue.

Lost in all the glowing Windows 7 reviews and marketing hype is the fact that not everything about Microsoft’s new OS is an unqualified success. You don’t have to use Win7 for very long before you notice one of your favorite features of earlier Windows versions is changed or missing.

But if you don’t like the default Win7 interface and the features that Microsoft prefers, no problem! A few simple tweaks can let you adjust Win7 to your own liking. Even better, some of the following tips also apply to Vista and XP.

The return of the Quick Launch toolbar

Annoyance: The latest Windows versions let you place the Quick Launch toolbar on the taskbar. From there, you can launch your favorite applications, documents, or folder windows with a single click. In Windows 7, unfortunately, Quick Launch is MIA.

In Win7, a new Taskbar combines elements of the classic Taskbar and Quick Launch toolbars into one. To be sure, many people like the new Taskbar. Al Arnston is one of several readers who suggests that Win7’s “Pin to Taskbar” feature trumps Quick Launch. But you may disagree.

“There’s no need to use the ‘hidden’ Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7. Just right-click any program and select Pin to Taskbar. This will create an icon for that program and place it on the left side of the taskbar. A single click launches it just like the old Quick Launch did in previous Windows versions.”

Solution:

“Regarding Dennis O’Reilly’s piece on Windows 7 early adopters: Quick Launch is still available, but it’s hidden by default. You have to know where to look:

C:\ Users \ username \ AppData \ Roaming \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Quick Launch

“Simply create a new toolbar and point to this location. You’ll have to enable ’show hidden files’ to find it.”

An alternate solution that I prefer is to devise a custom toolbar that serves as a Quick Launch replacement. To do so, create shortcuts to your most-used items and place them into a folder stored anywhere on your computer.

(Not sure how to create a shortcut? Right-click the desktop or any other folder and choose New, Shortcut. Enter the path to the file or folder you’re linking to, or click Browse to locate the file. Give the shortcut a name and click Finish.)

Next, right-click the taskbar and choose New, Toolbar. Locate and select the folder you just created and click Select Folder. Voilà!

You can customize the taskbar’s settings by right-clicking it and choosing one of the options. For example, choose Show Text to uncheck and remove labels; or click View, Small Icons to pack more shortcuts into a smaller space. Drag the toolbar to your preferred position in the taskbar. If it doesn’t move, right-click the taskbar and make sure Lock the taskbar is unchecked.

Restore ‘Show Desktop,’ ‘Switch Between Windows’

Annoyance: Other useful items you may be missing from Windows 7’s taskbar are the two buttons named Show Desktop and Switch Between Windows. What to do?

Solution 1: In Windows 7, the Show Desktop button is actually still there, but it’s been moved to the end of the taskbar farthest from the Start button. Similarly, the function served by the Switch Between Windows button is now available by holding down the Windows key and pressing Tab repeatedly to scroll through your open windows.

Solution 2: If you prefer to have these features appear as buttons in your Quick Launch toolbar, you can recreate them. To make a new Show Desktop button, open Notepad or your preferred text editor and type the following lines just as they appear here:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file with the name Show Desktop.scf. Hold down the right mouse button as you drag the file to your Quick Launch bar, and then choose Move Here.

Creating a Switch Between Windows button is even simpler: right-click the Desktop and choose New, Shortcut. When prompted for the location, type the following line:

C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe DwmApi #105

Click Next, name the shortcut Switch Between Windows, and click Finish.

To give the button an appropriate look, right-click your new shortcut and then click Properties, Change Icon, Browse. Select imageres.dll and click Open. The default selection in the upper-left corner of the window should do the trick. Click OK twice.

Finally, use the right mouse button to drag the shortcut to your Quick Launch bar, just as you did with the Show Desktop button.

Return of the mysterious disappearing taskbar

Annoyance: You install your favorite screen saver on your Windows 7 machine. When you leave your computer, the screen saver kicks in and, eventually, the power-saving settings shut down the monitor. When you return to the machine, the taskbar has disappeared!

Solution: Some third-party screen savers that aren’t designed for Windows 7 can cause this problem. Your first step should be to see whether the screen saver’s developer has an updated version designed specifically for Win7.

If an update isn’t available, locate your screen saver’s .scr file and create a shortcut to it. Store the shortcut on the desktop or somewhere on the Start menu. To make this solution keyboard-friendly, right-click the shortcut and choose Properties. Click in the Shortcut key box and press the key combination you want to use to activate your screen saver. Finally, click OK.

The next time your taskbar disappears, use your keyboard shortcut — or launch the screen saver from the menu or desktop shortcut. The next mouse move or keystroke will dismiss the screen saver — if it has had time to start — and restore your taskbar.

Prevent Win7 from saving duplicate themes

Annoyance: You use the Control Panel’s Personalization applet to modify an existing theme. When you’re done, you click Save to preserve your work. Instead of just saving your existing theme, you have to enter a new name.

You type the same name as that of the theme you changed, but rather than ask whether you want to overwrite the old theme, Windows simply creates another theme with the same name and adds it to the list.

For some bizarre reason, Microsoft thinks this dialog box’s Save function should behave differently than every other Save function in Windows. The result: every little change you make to your theme results in a new copy, even if you want only one.

Solution: You can’t change the weird Save behavior, but at least you can clean up all your duplicate themes. Press Win+E to open an Explorer window and navigate to this location:

C: \ Users \ username \ AppData \ Local \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Themes

Replace username with the name of the current account. Once the folder’s open, delete the extra themes you don’t need.

If you’re not sure which to delete, press Alt, V, D to switch to Explorer’s Details view, then sort the files by date to find the newest ones you created. If you saved over an existing name, the older theme will be named “My Theme” while the new one will be named “My Theme (2).”

Bonus tip: If you decide to change a theme name by renaming the file in this folder — other than just deleting the number Windows adds automatically — you won’t see the new name in the Personalize window unless you open the theme file in Notepad and change the text to the right of the DisplayName= attribute.

Tile some open windows, but not all of them

Annoyance: In XP and Vista, you could selectively tile just the open windows you wanted by Ctrl-clicking their taskbar buttons, right-clicking one of the selected buttons, and choosing an arrangement option on the right-click menu. For some reason, Windows 7 has removed this capability.

You can still arrange all open windows by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing an option, but you can’t limit the rearrangement to just a subset of those windows; you’re forced to minimize the windows you don’t want to tile first.

Solution: The ability to tile windows selectively has been replaced in Windows 7 by Aero Snap. This is a new feature that lets you tile windows side by side by dragging the title bar of one window to the far left side of the screen and another to the far right. The two should snap into position.

Unfortunately, Aero Snap doesn’t work if you have two monitors or if you want to stack one window above another.

If Aero Snap isn’t the window arrangement you’re looking for, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to launch the Task Manager (or right-click the taskbar and choose Task Manager). In the Applications tab, Ctrl-click only the windows you want to work with. Then choose a tile or cascade option from Task Manager’s Windows menu.

Note that this technique may not work on the first try if one or more of the selected windows are currently minimized or open on different monitors.

Microsoft keeps coming up with new features, but in the process, the company sometimes also discovers entirely new ways to irritate us Windows users. As long as there’s a Windows, we’ll keep showing you how to work around the inevitable annoyances.

Related posts:

1. Launch your favorite applications faster PC Tips for lauching your favorite application faster There are...
2. Windows 7 Calculator to Vista PC Tips for Windows 7 Calculator to Vista Windows 7...
3. How to make Windows Vista boot faster PC Tips for making Windows Vista boot faster The time...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

PC Tips for lauching your favorite application faster

There are several ways to launch apps quickly, using either mouse or keyboard.

Direct method: You can assign keystrokes to launch any shortcut. Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties. On the Shortcut tab, click in the Shortcut key box and then press the keys you want to use to launch the shortcut. Click OK.

A word of warning: Be careful not to reassign other useful keyboard shortcuts you may have already assigned. Also, you can assign keyboard shortcuts only to icon shortcuts — not the actual icon of a document or application.

Search method: In Vista and Win 7, press the Windows key to open the Start menu. Then type a few letters until the search tool finds the program you want to launch; press Enter. The catch — if you have several programs starting with the same characters, you end up taking more time typing than if you simply mouse-clicked the application’s icon.

Menu method: For me, the “classic” Start menu provides a better solution. If you organize shortcuts into a hierarchy of menus, each starting with a unique character, you can navigate the menus quickly and launch most programs with only 3 or 4 keystrokes.

For example, to launch Photoshop (which is on my Start menu’s Images menu), I press the keyboard Windows key and then type I, P (see Figure 1). For Microsoft Excel, I type Win, N, X (Start, Numbers, eXcel). Before long, you’ll know your shortcuts by heart.

To get the classic Start menu in XP or Vista, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. On the Start Menu tab, select Classic Start menu and click OK.

Bonus tip. To avoid having menu items start with the same letter, either rename them or place an ampersand in front of any letter in the name. The character following the ampersand will then act as the shortcut for that item.

Mouse methods: For fast launching using the mouse, put the shortcuts you use most often into the Quick Launch toolbar (or another custom toolbar) on the taskbar. Right-click the taskbar to open its properties; add the Quick Launch toolbar if yours is missing. (Personally, I prefer not to pin shortcuts to the taskbar because it quickly fills with open-program icons.)

If you have Windows 7, you can also “pin” shortcuts to the taskbar. Right-click a running program on the taskbar and choose Pin this program to the task bar to make a launch button stay there.

Open another window (Win 7): To quickly launch another instance of a running program, Shift-click its taskbar button. Not all applications support multiple instances.

Related posts:

1. Quick cures for the worst Windows 7 annoyances PC Tips for Quick cures for the worst Windows 7...
2. Make Programs Load Faster PC Tips for Making Programs Load Faster This little tweak...
3. How to make Windows Vista boot faster PC Tips for making Windows Vista boot faster The time...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

PC Tips for Windows 7 Calculator to Vista

Windows 7 will most likely offer users a pleasant surprise, at least through its redefined interface and the set of redesigned tools it brings. The plain old calculator suffered a beautiful transformation into a more consumer-oriented product capable of serving both more science prone users as well as the average Joe.

As you probably know, the application can be downloaded as a standalone product here, and run from portable devices with no problem at all, as it requires no installation; a double click on the executable will suffice to launch it. It works nicely on Vista but I bet that you’d appreciate complete integration in the operating system so that it would be automatically launched instead of the plain old version of Windows Calculator.

The procedure is actually a matter of gaining full control of the much dreaded, vital file keeper, System32 folder. Normally, you do not have access to modifying the data in it, not even if you run your account in administrator mode or become the administrator by running the command net user administrator /active:Yes in Command Prompt.

But there are plenty of workarounds to this and besides running Take Ownership registry tweaks, or using third-party software such as Unlocker to cut off all the strings to a file and be able to bend it your way, there is also a very easy but pretty dangerous solution. It is a matter of permission that can be fixed from the Properties of the System32 folder.

So get into System32’s properties and access the Security tab. Next click on “Advanced” button in the lower part of the window. Right now you should be in Permissions tab that lists all permission entries and you can safely click on the Edit button. Another Permissions window pops up listing once more the permission entries. Here’s where you get to select the desired user you want to grant full control over System32 folder and edit the security approvals. Simply check the Full control checkbox to gain complete power over the folder. OK everything and that is it.

If all this seems like mumbo jumbo to you and it is too difficult to understand, I’ll translate it for you, with the help of these easy to follow steps:

Select folder > right click > Properties > Security tab > click Advanced > click Edit > select desired user > click Edit > check Full control box > OK > OK > OK > OK

- you will have to wait for a while for the new permissions to be set.

Now that full control over the System32 folder is in your hands, it is time to replace the old Windows Calculator with the fresh Windows 7 one. In my case I made a backup copy of the old app by adding an underscore (“_”) suffix to its name, just in case.

The original files that need to be replaced are calc.exe located in the root of System32 and calc.exe.mui in the “en-US” folder of System32. As mentioned before, I made backups to these, just in case, and I recommend you do the same. If you do this, all it takes to finish the process is copying the files in Windows 7 Calculator archive in the exact places with the original ones.

If all the steps have been followed correctly, Windows 7 Calculator should be the default calculator for your system. And if you took my advice and renamed the original files, you will have access to the old calculator as well by typing the new given name in the Run box (in my case calc_).

Once all this is done I suggest you remove the full control so that no unfortunate accidents take place because System32 is a very sensitive folder for the system. If you can’t remember the previous permissions, in my case they were limited to Traverse folder / execute file, List folder / read data, Read attributes, Read extended attributes and Read permissions. As you probably notice there is no write permission granted so this should be enough hint for you not to mess around with the data.

Related posts:

1. Encrypted File System In Vista PC Tips for Encrypting File System in Vista Files that...
2. Add an elevated Command Prompt for Vista PC Tips for Adding elevated Command Prompt for Vista Add...
3. Delete your TEMP files on shutdown PC Tips for Deleting your TEMP Files on Shutdown It...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.