Windows Tools, Help & Guides

By default in Windows 7, there’s a 400ms delay between you hovering your mouse over an open program’s Taskbar icon, and a preview of the open program being shown.

This guide will show you how to shorten that delay.

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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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Note: This is a work in progress as I have close to 1,000 articles to update.

On this website, I use these notational conventions:

• Italic: Text from the current dialogue you are working with.
• Bold: the name of a keyboard key.
• Italic bold: something you type as shown, e.g., regedit. Unless otherwise specified, you can use uppercase or lowercase letter.
• Click: move the cursor to the referenced item and press the left mouse button.
• Press: push on a keyboard key.
• Select: choose from a list.

By default, Windows Vista has a 400 ms delay when opening menus; you can shorten this time to 200 ms without degrading performance. Learn how in this guide.

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There are quite a few registry hacks on this website that help you get the most out of your computer. Sometimes the keys are buried deep in the registry, so in this guide, you’ll learn how to put a ‘Jump to registry’ item on the context menu in IE or Firefox. The IE version is inspired by WinhelpOnline. Thanks Ramesh.

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