One of the most talked about annoyances in Windows Vista are the UAC prompts that constantly pop up when you are trying to make system changes. It’s especially irritating when you often need to run a particular tool that requires administrator mode in order to run. Thankfully there’s a simple hack that you can do to create an administrator mode shortcut that doesn’t prompt for UAC.

By default when you right-click your desktop to get to the Context Menu’s New folder, there is a lot of items you probably don’t use. Here we look at how to clean up the menu for faster access in creating a new folder.

When you first get your shiny new Windows 7 PC, typing anything into the Start Menu search box returns exactly what you want instantly—but what about once you’ve built up loads of files? It tends to get really slow, but here’s how to fix it.

If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably had a problem with the Windows taskbar refusing to auto-hide, even though you’ve set the option in Control Panel. Here’s a few tips that might get that Taskbar hidden again.

If you’re an administrator and trying to get work done quickly, having the Program Compatibility Assistant popping up constantly can be annoying. Today we take a look at how to disable this feature if you are tired of seeing the nagging messages.

Aero Peek is one of the more useful new features in Windows 7… just move your mouse to the taskbar for half a second, and everything else hides so you can see the desktop or application window. But why does it take half a second?

One of the interesting new features in Windows 7 is the way you can grab a window by the title bar and “shake” it back and forth to minimize everything else. It’s a fun feature, but just in case you want to disable it we’ve got the solution for you.

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

One of the hot new features in Windows 7 is the improved window management functions… you can simply drag a window to the top or sides of the screen, and it will be maximized or resized to take up only half of the screen.

The only problem is that some people like to drag windows partially off the screen, a very useful technique when you only need to see the edge of a window… but in Windows 7 it will resize the window to fill half the screen. So how do we disable it?

Here’s a screenshot of what we’re talking about… for more screenshots see our review of the Windows 7 beta release.

Disabling Mouse Window Drag Arranging

Open up your Control Panel, and then go to the Ease of Access center. From there, click on “Make the mouse easier to use”…

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

Have you ever been doing something, like playing a game, and had that obnoxious Sticky Keys dialog pop up? You answer No and it goes away… and then shows up again the next day. Here’s how to make it go away for good.

In case you aren’t sure what we mean… hit the Shift key five times fast.

A lot of Windows users out there dislike Internet Explorer enough that just using a different browser is not enough, they want it gone.  Although there is not a way to completely uninstall it, let’s take a look at how to disable IE 8 in Windows 7 so you won’t have to deal with it anymore.

Click on the Start Menu and go to Control Panel and change the View by category to Large or Small icons then from the Control Panel list go into Programs and Features.

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

The caps lock key is one of those remnants of another age of computers, back when people used to shout at each other more often. Unless you’re in the accounting department, it’s probably not very useful, so today we’ll learn how to disable it.

If you’re using Mac OS X instead, you can follow our guide on how to disable Caps Lock in OS X using a registry hack, or you can map any key to any key if you really want to.

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

If you are just running a home computer for gaming or something unimportant, you might not want to have to log in every single time you reboot your computer. There’s an easy tweak that will let you autologin.

First, we’ll need to get to the Advanced User Accounts Control Panel to get to this setting. I think there’s a registry tweak as well, but that seems like too much work.

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

The Windows Explorer click sounds are enough to drive you crazy after a while. You’d think that the configuration option to turn them off would be a checkbox saying “Stop Annoying Me”, but that’s just not the case.

To open up the sounds configuration panel quickly, just type in mmsys.cpl into the start menu search box, and hit enter. You could also go to the Sounds and Audio devices in Control Panel, or even type Sound into the search box.

(reprinted from HowToGeek.com)

We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. I’ve become convinced that this dialog has been designed to detect when we are most busy and only prompt us at that moment.

The real problem comes into play when Windows gets tired of reminding us and says that the computer is going to reboot in 5 minutes, and the only way you can prevent the inevitable is to temporarily disable Windows Update.

There’s a couple of ways that we can disable this behavior, however. You’ll still get the prompt, but it won’t force you to shut down.

Cleaning the Context Menu by Hacking the Registry

If you want to clean things up the truly geeky way, you can open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to one of the following keys… sadly the context menu items are not stored in a single location.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) are not essential. They do serve a purpose, but you may find yourself wanting them to not run. Here's how:

• Open the application 
  • click the MSE icon in the task-bar
  • find MSE from the start menu
  • navigate to or click start->run and enter "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Essentials\msseces.exe"
• From the control panel
• go to the ‘Settings’ tab 
• Un-tick the ‘Turn on real-time protection’ checkbox
• Microsoft Security Essentials is now disabled

 

If you've managed to not know what Windows Defender is, you probably aren't a Windows user. As the not so great security offerings from Microsoft go it's not bad, it does work, it is free and isn't too resource heavy, but nonetheless it is redundant if you have another application installed.

 

Turn Windows Defender on or off

 

When Windows Defender is on, you will be alerted when spyware and other potentially unwanted software tries to install itself, run on your computer, or change important Windows settings. If you use the default settings, WindowsDefender will also check for new definitions, regularly scan for spyware and other potentially unwanted software, and automatically remove any detected item that has a recommended removal action.

1. Open Windows Defender by clicking the Start button , clicking All Programs, and then clicking Windows Defender.

2. Click Tools, and then click Options.

3. Under Administrator options, select or clear the Use WindowsDefender check box, and then click Save.  If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

It sure can be hard keeping up with things in computer-land.

There's a not-so-obvious thing called the "architecture" of your computer's processor which has mostly changed now for new machines, but many people are not finding out what it means to them until it costs them some money. Basically the way that the processor counts is based on binary numbers, and everybody kinda understands that machines count in ones and zeros. What they don't understand is

Ever since some Vista designers decided it was a cool idea to make zip files show up as folders in the left hand (tree view) pane of WIndows Explorer, I've been irked by it. For cryin' out loud fellahs, they're NOT folders. If they were folders, we'd call them that. Folders can be used as-is; zip files must be decompressed to be used. Besides that, double-clicking the file doesn't actually do anything except open it for viewing, when you try to use anything in the file you're faced with a Windows wizard. Yum.

When they lifted this idea from a couple of different file browsers on the linux platforms, Microsoft neglected to include the libraries that allow the compressed files to be used as-is, which makes integrating them into the Explorer as if they could be just a mean tease, and not really a "feature" at all.