Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Unfortunately, for those of us that have an OCD with changing icons, and tricking out our desktops, there’s never been an easy way to manually change the drive icons in ‘Computer’.  There are plenty of programs out there that can do the job for us but I’m a believer, in doing things the hard way!

EDIT:  Batu, a Windows Forums member has made a small portable application that will change them for you.  Thanks Batu! :)

This guide will show you how to edit the registry so you can use your own icons for your drives in ‘Computer’ (Windows Explorer). Read the rest of this entry »

Removing the shutdown options from the start menu may not be everyone’s cup of tea.  This registry hack may come in handy if you’re performing a large backup or downloading a big file and you share your computer with other family members/colleagues and don’t want them inadvertently turning off your computer half through the job.

This guide obviously involves editing the registry.  Please see here before modifying your registry.

I’ve written two reg. files you can download here if you don’t want to manually edit the registry.  See here on ways to add these files to the registry

For those of you who don’t mind getting stuck in, here we go.

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Google offer a very healthy 7372 MB of storage to it’s GMail users.  Previously i’ve covered how to use Windows SkyDrive to your advantage.  This time it’s Googles turn.

This guide will show you how to add your GMail account to Windows Explorer, thus enabling a drag & drop system for you to use you GMail account as additional storage on your computer.  Even if you don’t use GMail as an email provider nobody can turn down an extra 8GB of storage, can you?

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The default backgrounds in Windows 7 are very pleasing to look at.  However, many of you like to change the login screen.  There are plenty of programs out there that do the job well.  This one is in a league of it’s own.  Logon Screen Rotator (2.1.0.2) is a tiny freeware program that can not only change your login screen, it can use multliple images or folders of images to do it and rotate them.  An innovative touch to this program is it’s ability to change at a user specified time.

No installation is required for this to work.  Just extract the application and run it.

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• Download this 4-part series as a PDF (Parts 1-4 +Extras)
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

10.  Speed Up Media Browser Using USB Flash Drive

I have quite a large movie collection, and find that MB can take a while to load all of the DVD covers & backdrops for the entire library.

Using a USB Flash Drive should eliminate this problem as they’re generally a lot quicker than your hard drive, anything that’s good enough for ‘ReadyBoost’ should suffice for this.  You should see a big improvement immediately.

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Previously, we’ve covered how to add custom Libraries and assign a icon to them in Windows 7.

People seem to have mixed opinions about the new library feature and in this guide, i’ll show you how to open up Explorer in the ‘Computer’ view instead of opening into ‘Libraries’
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