Windows Tools, Help & Guides

There are many ways to organize your files on your computer and provide shortcuts to them. In this guide, I hope to provide some inspiration; hopefully you can come up with some great ways to access the data on your drive.

I’ve written about how to organize your files in the past and in this guide I will focus mainly on how to get to those files easily without installing any extra software.

Creating Shortcuts to Your Data

I don’t store my personal documents in the conventional place Windows provides. This is because I frequently change operating systems and have different systems on one machine so I need a central repository of files. More information about this can be read here including instructions of how to implement this properly.

First Organize Your Files

I highly recommend organizing your files in an intuitive and efficient manner before working on how to get to them. Below is a screenshot of my E partition which is my media drive on my laptop:

As you can see, I organize my files by media type and I’ve also customized the folder icons.

Creative Shortcuts on Your Desktop

Recently, I’ve taken to using over-sized shortcuts on my desktop. I don’t usually have any icons on my desktop but I’ve found the shortcuts to be both aesthetically pleasing and useful.

(Click to enlarge)

To achieve this effect, do the following:

1. Right-click on the folder, you want to create a shortcut to, and click Create shortcut
2. Copy the shortcut to your desktop
3. Click on a blank space on the desktop, hold the CTRL key, and scroll your wheel mouse to change the size of the icon
4. To remove the shortcut overlay icon, follow this guide

You now have a desktop with oversized and stylish shortcuts.

Create Your Own Shortcut Tool Bar

If you have a setup similar to mine, mentioned above, you can easily make a shortcut to all the folders appear on your taskbar with the icons you previously selected. To achieve the effect shown above, do the following:

1. Right click a blank space on the start menu, select Toolbars > New Toolbar…

   

2. Select the parent folder with the links to your folders you want shortcuts to

   

3. The folder will now appear on your start menu

   

The previous steps may be enough to provide you with a useful shortcut system; to change the text label to icons, do the following:

1. Double-click on the folder name on the start menu to expand to the subfolders
2. Now right click the folder name and deselect Show Text and Show Title

   

3. Resize the toolbar as needed to achieve the following effect:

   

Further Customization

Do you have any other ways to customize your shortcut icons? Do you have a good Dock-style solution or method that does not require extra software? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Windows, by default, put a small arrow on shortcuts to indicate they are a shortcut and not a file. This feature is very useful and can help you determine what type of file you are dealing with. If you are customizing your desktop or a folder, you may not want these shortcut overlay icons as they may ruin your design. In this guide, you’ll learn how to remove the icons from the shortcuts with a simple program.

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Windows update is an excellent way to keep your computer up to date and protected from the latest vulnerabilities. Sometimes, Windows update will apply a patch that requires your computer to be restarted. Many times, this restart comes at an inopportune time as you may have a lot to get done that day. Windows Vista does not bug you as much as Windows XP, because you can change the interval at which Windows to remind you to restart your computer. Regardless of your operating system, you may just want to stop the notifications entirely and restart your computer the end of the day. Why do not recommend this, I often find myself delaying the restart process. In this guide, you’ll learn how to stop Windows update notifying you until the next time you restart your PC.

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Windows Vista comes with an innovative and useful Start menu, which is highly customizable. In this guide, you will learn how to customize the power button on the Start menu in Windows Vista. if you frequently lock your computer, and then having the lock button right there on the start menu and will likely be very useful; however, if you usually just shut down your computer using it, you may want to change the default button action.

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Have you ever been in a room that has ever on opposite walls? If you look into one of the mirrors you see an infinite view as the image is reflected back and forth between the two. The other day, when I was quite tired, I wanted to control one of my computers and ended up logging in to the computer I was currently using. I was faced with an infinite view of my computer as it attempted to show my screen within my screen which had my screen within this one and so on. I am surprised this didn’t crash my computer because anyone who programs knows an infinite loop will use all the resources possible until your computer crashes. This really isn’t a guide and it really isn’t helpful but if you are using LogMeIn, you may want to give this one try.

Click to enlarge this image

LogMeIn

If you’re all about customization, you have probably spent time on this site looking at the wallpapers, icons, fonts, screen savers, and more. One of the things I like to do is make my computer look unique–without going over the top. In this guide, you’ll learn how to give your wireless/wired network a specific icon. If you use different networks on your computer (presumably a laptop), these icons can help you identify the network you need and also look great.

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In this guest post, James Ricketts explores EXE errors related to Symantec. Learn more about James at the conclusion of this post.

It is very likely that most computer users have experienced EXE errors or errors related to the executable files at one time or another. EXE errors are one of the most common categories of application errors that your computer is likely to encounter. This is simply because there are hundreds of applications on your PC and each one of them comprises several EXE files. When you consider the number of EXE files residing on a computer, it is easy to understand the likelihood of something going wrong with one or more of them.

EXE errors can crop up while working on any computer application and applications from Symantec suite are no exception. Symantec is a popular software manufacturer of Internet and PC security products. Symantec products help make our PC less vulnerable to bugs and errors. At the same time, like any other application, it too uses EXE files and some of them may develop problems.

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