Category: Windows

If you are using Windows Vista you know that Vista tries to figure out what kind of files you have in a folder and tries to show them to you in an “optimized” view.
You also probably know that that is not always accurate and that Vista doesn’t always respect your wishes when you change the view.
How about if Vista wouldn’t try to guess anymore?
You can download ExplorerView and disable the automatic content detection to stop Vista from guessing.

Continue reading “Folder Recognition in Windows Vista”

101 Fantastic Freebies

PC World Canada has a nice reference of 101 great free services and programs at PC World.
There’s something for everyone.
PC World:
Whether you’re partial to online services or to downloadable software, here’s the Web’s best free stuff and it’ll keep you productive, secure, and entertained.

PC World Canada has a very nice list of free and shareware utilities that can help speed up your PCs.

Just go to PC World to find short descriptions of these utilities and the places where to get them.

You can tell the computer to beep at you when you hit the CAPS LOCK key.

In Windows XP, click the Start button, select the “Control Panel” and then open the “Accessibility Options”.
In the “Keyboard” tab, check the “Use ToggleKeys” box. You may also want to go into the settings beside it and turn off the “Keyboard Shortcut” to it.

In Windows Vista, click the Start button, select “Control Panel” and then click on “Ease of Access” followed by “Change how your keyboard works”.
Select “Turn on Togglekeys” and you may also want to deselect the feature to toggle it by pressing the NUM LOCK for 5 seconds.

Then just confirm everything and you are ready to go.

Most computers in businesses and personal homes still run Windows XP and haven’t been upgraded to Vista.
If yours is one of them, head over to PC World to get a great compilation of tips on how to make it work faster and better to work with.

If you want to open the network connection list in Vista, it is quite a bit more complicated than it is in XP, where you could just right click Network Connections and click Properties.
In Vista you can go through several clicks in the Control Panel – or you can just type ncpa.cpl in the search field on the Start menu. Press the Enter key and the network connections list appears.
You can also take this one step further and create a shortcut to the network connections list.

A little something for when it’s just too much work to reach for the mouse:

Instead of clicking the File menu, pointing to New, etc or right-clicking into the file pane, you can often just press the F+W+F keys while holding down the ALT key and a new folder is created on most systems.
On some you can try to use F+W while pressing ALT and then hit the Enter key.

Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier recovers files from disks with physical damage. It allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method, most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.

You can download it at http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

With hard drives getting cheaper and cheaper, it gets less likely that you run out of space than it was a few years ago. Still, you may not want to upgrade that particular drive for one reason or another. Or you are really collecting a lot of stuff.
If you don’t quite know what is taking up the space, then you can call WinDirStat to the rescue. It is a free program which you can download at http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/.
It scans your hard drive – or just some folders if you wish – and then displays how much space the items are taking up.
While it does have a funky-looking graphical display, personally, I find the text display more useful. (My wife really likes the graphic display though.)
And with file-deleting capabilities just a right-click away, it re-calculates file usage immediately when you remove files from within the program.
Maybe you’ll find some long-lost humongous files you forgot about and can delete? I was able to clean up about 20GB of files I had all forgetten about and don’t need any more.

Launchy for XP

If you have been working any time on Windows Vista, you may have used the searchable start menu.
Launchy is a utility for Windows XP that has similar functionality. No more hunting through the start menu to find the link to the program you know is there somewhere, but instead now it is just a few keystrokes away.
Go To http://www.launchy.net/ to download the software and/or have a look at what you may be missing.