Well welcome to Monday. For today’s Windows Tip I thought I’d give you a bunch of little tips and tweaks and such to help you in your everyday computing life, While some of these may seem trivial, I promise they make your life alot easier. So Grab your triple espresso and jump on in:

(NOTE: These tips have all been proven to work on Windows XP Pro, I don’t know if they all work on other version, I imagine they should though.)

SHIFT+”No” = No to All
If you’ve ever performed some kind of file operation, you’ll be blasted with “Are you sure?”-type dialog boxes with the options, “Yes”, “Yes to All”, “No” and “Cancel”. Hold down SHIFT and press “No” to mean, “No to All”.

Delete Whole Words
Press Control and Backspace to delete the whole word instead of a single letter. This also works when selecting words. (Hold shift and then Control)

Single key-press file/folder renaming
Select a file or folder and press the F2 key… rename.

Faster webpage look up
Instead of typing http://www.anysite.com you can just type anysite then press ctrl+return and it automatically puts in the http:// and the .com
yahoo + “ctrl+return” = http://www.yahoo.com

Bypass Recycling Bin Whenever You Wish
The more flexible method of bypassing the recycling bin is to simply hold SHIFT while you delete your selected item(s). This will promt you to choose whether you want to permanently delete the item(s) or not. Simply click “yes” and the action will be completed.

Turn off Indexing to speed up XP
Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk so when you do a search on the hard drive it is faster. There is a downside to this and because the computer has to index all files, it will slow down normal file commands like open, close, etc. If you do not do a whole lot of searches on your hard drive then I suggest turnning this feature off (Note: If you do, then searching will most likely slow down ALOT):

1. Open my computer
2. Right click your hard drive icon and select properties.
3. At the bottom of the window you’ll see “Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches,” uncheck this and click ok.
4. A new window will pop up and select apply to all folders and subfolders. It will take a minute or two for the changes to take affect but then you should enjoy slightly faster performance.

Speed up Network Browsing
There was a bug in Windows 2000 that would cause the scheduled tasks folder to be searched when ever the user would browse network drives. Microsoft developed a fix for this bug. The fix fixed the problem and it also had nice side affect of speeding up browsing of Microsoft networks. Below are instructions how to apply the fix.

1. Open up regedit.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace.
3. Find a key named {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}.
4. Right click on it and delete it.
5. Restart

Open Windows Exporer in Any Directory you choose
This tweak provides a way to start your Windows-Explorer in any Directory that you want it to start.
Most people start the Windows-Explorer by clicking on a shortcut to the Windows-Explorer program. Noramlly the Windows-Explorer starts in the “My Documents” Directory. If you want Windows-Explorer to start in a different Directory, just follow the steps below:

1) Right-Click the shortcut to the Windows-Explorer
2) Choose “Properties”
3) On the “Shortcut” Tab, you see something like:
“Target: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe”
(without the quotes).
4) You have to change this into:
“%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n, /e, D:”
(without quotes). Instead of “D:” you can choose any path you like. In the example above, windows-explorer will start in “D:”.

Classic Search Style (Kill the dog, Poor pup)
In order to remove the annoying and useless search dog all you need to do is add one simple registry key. Regedit your way to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState Once there create a new String value and set its value to “no” (Do not use the quotes)

Toggle Display of Filenames in Thumbnail View
Toggle the display of thumbnail filenames by pressing the shift key when you open a folder or when you switch into thumbnail view.

Show MP3 Album Art in Folders
I have a ton of MP3s organized by albums. In each folder I have the album cover for the album (downloaded from Amazon or CDNow) and saved as folder.jpg. Whenever I go to the parent directory, I change its view to Thumbnails and all the child folders that have the album art in them show up as mini-previews in the folder image.

Quick User Switching
Hit Winkey+Q and hold it for a second.
Rehit Q to rotate to other users .

Turn off Thumbs.db
Thumbs.db is a file which is created in a folder with Movies or Pictures so that you can view a piece of their content without actualy opening them (you can’t see thumbnails unless you have the option to view system files turned on). Thumbs.db is there so that you don’t need to reload a thumbnail everytime you browse that folder. Sad fact is, is Thumbs.db takes up about 2kb per file and if you edit a lot of stuff its annoying to keep seeing them popping up all over your computer. You can remove thumbs.db quite easily by following these steps:

1. Go to Run in the startmenu
2. Type gpedit.msc
3. Click OK and the Group Policy will open
4. Go to User Configuration/Administrative Template/Windows Components/Windows Explorer
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the long list of stuff that now shows up in the menu on the right. Double-Click on Turn off caching of thumbnail pictures.
6. Click on Enable then Apply, Ok. And now you no longer have this annoying problem.

Disable Windows Picture Viewer and Fax Viewer
By default, Windows XP opens all picture files (gif,jpg,…) with the included Windows Picture and Fax Viewer no matter what other picture viewers you have installed. To disable the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, unregister shimgvw.dll. This can be done from command prompt:
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll

Well I think that will do it for today’s Windows Tip(s). Hope you enjoyed ‘em. Well as always email me with anything you need/want/hate or go post it in the forums. peace out-

-b