Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Windows Forums member, Ang087, received a Word document that wouldn’t open in her version of Microsoft Word. To fix the problem, she downloaded the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats.”

Learn more about the compatibility pack and download it here.

Windows Forums member, cnitin, has written a guide which teaches you how to put a “Toggle Hidden Files” button on your right-click context menu.

This is useful if you frequently work with hidden files but don’t want them showing all the time. Instead of going into the folder options and changing the setting each time, you can use a convenient toggle that can be accessed by a right click in Windows Explorer.

Want to change the text from “Toggle Hidden Files” to something less obvious like “Update View”? Just download the zip file, attached to the guide, open toggle.reg in Notepad, change the bolded part of the following line, and save the file before running run.cmd:

@=”Toggle Hidden Files“

Just download the attached zip file (link to the guide below), and double click run.cmd. There are also instructions to do this manually, but the cmd file works just fine.

Learn how here: Add “Toggle Hidden Files” Option to Context Menu

As previously requested on the Windows Forums suggestion box, there is now a section for Windows Tools that are made by mintywhite readers.

What Kind of Tools?

Take a look at the forum. You’ll find the following tools (and more):

• SevenDriveIconChanger – Change Windows drive icons to custom.
• SevenShutdownControl – Automate shutdown commands based on various criteria.
• AdSevenTextEnrypter – Encrypt your personal text.
• The Windows Guides Text to Speech Tool –  Type and hear it play back to you.

Made a Tool/Program/App/Widget?

If you made a tool, please add it to the forum so others can use it also (full credit is always given to the tool author.)

mintywhite Tools Forum

One of our readers (in our suggestion box) asked for a walkthrough on the different types of CD and DVD.

Unfortunately, a full description of the differences between all of the CD and DVD formats would fill an entire book. There are many, many different types of physical media, methods for storing the data, methods for writing the data and media formats (MPEG-2, MP3, AVI, MP4, etc.)

But… since most people use just a few of the CD/DVD formats, we’ll cover just those. The most common formats are generically known as CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, CD-Audio, DVD-Video, and the newer HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Microsoft, we maintain a repository of tools written by our engineers and technical staff. Many of the tools that are posted are very specific to Microsoft engineering— tools to help developers and testers better manage their project in our internal source control system, provide better visibility into our internal bug/issue tracking system, etc. Since these tools are very specific to the Microsoft environment, most of them don’t get released externally.

RDCMan is a central place where you can organize, group, and manage your various Remote Desktop connections.

Read More

Windows Forums member Batupata has done it again and created another great tool for Windows: AdSevenTextEnrypter

What does this program do?

This program will run an encryption/decryption algorithm on your text so the information is protected. For example: you can encrypt some text (say with “Set one” then “Set five”), send it to a friend, and they can decrypt it at the other end (with “Set five” then “Set one”.)

Can you decrypt this?

NJ6UlSESL1qd7p8aNfaUPuFQtM16shQtHI+phLXyEPzq71wZ3C
TfBmzm++2JvGyLy5O70KWVB0Z62ubpr18E3W+Y2TeVDG0e

(Hint: I used set 7 then set 2.)

Download AdSevenTextEnrypter