Windows Tools, Help & Guides

RSVR85 and I got together about a month ago and put together the Windows 7 Media Center Customization Handbook. RSVR85 took his previous Windows 7 Media Center Guides, updated them, and made them even easier to follow. I just put everything together and now it’s online and ready for your reading pleasure.

I’d like to thank RSVR85 for his hard work. This book is fantastic and I can’t wait to update my Media Center PC to Windows 7 so I can put these hacks into effect. His original forum post on the topic helped me customize Windows Vista’s Media Center (and this handbook will work, mostly, for Windows Vista Media Center.)

Download the Windows 7 Media Center Customization Handbook.

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Aero Peek is a cool new feature in Windows 7 that gives you X-Ray vision! By hovering the mouse over the small bar on the right hand side of the taskbar, you can temporarily see behind any open windows, to the desktop. Aero Peek is also used when the Alt+Tab combination on the keyboard is used & also when you hover your mouse over a Taskbar preview. By default, the delay from hovering the mouse on the bar on the Taskbar to showing the desktop is 1 second. This guide will show you how to speed things up (or slow it down).

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By default in Windows 7, there’s a 400ms delay between you hovering your mouse over an open program’s Taskbar icon, and a preview of the open program being shown.

This guide will show you how to shorten that delay.

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This guide will show you how to change the start orb in Windows 7, for the sake of simplicity and article length, i’ll only be showing how to change the orb with the taskbar along the bottom. (Start Orb bottom left).

If you have Photoshop or GIMP, then you can go ahead and even make your own. I’ve posted one i’ve made in the forums and it has the PSD included for a template if you want it.

Note: You need to have access to the admin account in order to complete this guide. Please read through this guide thoroughly before proceeding, and take it slow!

Without further ado, let get on with it!

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This guide is part of the Windows Desktop Theme Customization Series. If you want to learn how to install Themes in your version of Windows or want to locate some new themes, head here. If you’d like to keep up with this series and other articles from this site, subscribe here.

Create Desktop Themes in Windows 7

To create a theme, download this chapter excerpt from Windows 7 – The Pocket Guide. Get the full book, for free, here. Read the rest of this entry »

If you like to customize you Windows installation, you may have considered adding a theme. In this series, you’ll learn how to install a theme and then I’ll share the very best themes with you; this, if you already know how to install a theme, you’ll find greater benefit at the end of the week when I link to the themes. If you’re new to this, take your time, and be sure to seek help in the forums.

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Unfortunately, for those of us that have an OCD with changing icons, and tricking out our desktops, there’s never been an easy way to manually change the drive icons in ‘Computer’.  There are plenty of programs out there that can do the job for us but I’m a believer, in doing things the hard way!

This guide will show you how to edit the registry so you can use your own icons for your drives in ‘Computer’ (Windows Explorer). Read the rest of this entry »

Removing the shutdown options from the start menu may not be everyone’s cup of tea.  This registry hack may come in handy if you’re performing a large backup or downloading a big file and you share your computer with other family members/colleagues and don’t want them inadvertently turning off your computer half through the job.

This guide obviously involves editing the registry.  Please see here before modifying your registry.

I’ve written two reg. files you can download here if you don’t want to manually edit the registry.  See here on ways to add these files to the registry

For those of you who don’t mind getting stuck in, here we go.

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The default backgrounds in Windows 7 are very pleasing to look at.  However, many of you like to change the login screen.  There are plenty of programs out there that do the job well.  This one is in a league of it’s own.  Logon Screen Rotator (2.1.0.2) is a tiny freeware program that can not only change your login screen, it can use multliple images or folders of images to do it and rotate them.  An innovative touch to this program is it’s ability to change at a user specified time.

No installation is required for this to work.  Just extract the application and run it.

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• Download this 4-part series as a PDF (Parts 1-4 +Extras)
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

10.  Speed Up Media Browser Using USB Flash Drive

I have quite a large movie collection, and find that MB can take a while to load all of the DVD covers & backdrops for the entire library.

Using a USB Flash Drive should eliminate this problem as they’re generally a lot quicker than your hard drive, anything that’s good enough for ‘ReadyBoost’ should suffice for this.  You should see a big improvement immediately.

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