Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Sudesh has always been curious about computers and technology. Loves to play with both Windows and Linux. Likes to help people solve their computer problems. Has written technical articles and tutorials for some websites including MintyWhite.

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The location sensors in Windows 7 enable your operating system and other software to adapt to your current geographical location. Of course, your computer must have a location sensor supporting hardware e.g., a GPS device, wireless WAN radios or other cellular triangulation technologies. Using these location sensors, your applications can know exactly where you are and provide you with relevant information and content. For example, some twitter clients in Windows can use the location sensors and can automatically post your geographical location along with your tweets.

Most of the modern laptops and desktops are coming with some sort of GPS device installed inside them to take advantage of this location sensor feature in Windows. But even if your computer does not have such a location sensor hardware device,  you can install a software emulation of such devices. Geosense for Windows is such a software based location sensor for Windows 7 which uses Google Location API to find your present location.

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Some of the programs that we use in Windows, have a system menu containing an option – Always on top.  If selected, this feature sets a window to be always on top of other windows. This is very useful if you want to work across multiple windows but want to focus more of your attention on a particular window. You can set that window to be always on top and keep an eye on it. I personally use this feature to set my TV Tuner window to be always on top so that I can enjoy TV programs while doing work at the same time.

 

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Although you can set Windows Explorer to show you the thumbnails of all your pictures, it usually makes it slower to browse through different folders. Additionally it also creates multiple thumbs.db files in each folder and all such files may take up considerable amount of disk space. An alternative to thumbnail preview feature of Windows is adding an image preview in the right-click menu. This can be done easily using the free FastPreview shell extension. It adds an Image Preview in the right-click context menu so that when you right-click on an image file, you see its preview right inside the context menu.

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A file’s hash value is a signature for that file that uniquely identifies it. If a file’s contents change, its hash value will also change. You can use the hash value of a file to know whether it has been modified or altered. You can also cross-check the hashes of a suspicious file online to see if it’s a malicious file. Windows 7 does not have any native way to show or calculate a file’s hashes. But you can use the freeware HashTab tool to add a File Hashes tab in the file properties dialog.

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