Windows Tools, Help & Guides

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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Windows Guides reader, TheManRetired, offers two guides to help users who are new to Windows. The first guide covers installation of Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free. This second guide covers setting up your first backup to CD or DVD. If you’d like to provide help (simple, advanced etc., let me know.)

Hopefully you have the program installed but if you don’t I have written up an installation document that shows how to install it and where to get the program with a link to site that I know has it, so here we are going to start using the program. The screen shot here are made using the FastStone Capture program. With Burning Studio you can backup just about anything that is on your hard drive but I suggest only backing up what you have created as you can never get all the files and registry setting for programs and it is safer and better to reinstall the programs anyway so they set right and work and you don’t have to try and find out why they are not working like before. Here I am backing some music files that I ripped from my cd’s but the principles apply to all your files, you will just have to change the location of where you get the files to places on your hard drive and sorry this document will not go into all the places on your hard drive that the files are, most of them on a windows system will be in my documents(or just documents depending on your version) and most of them are located under your user account in either Documents and Settings or under Users depending on your version of windows, I am not going into any Linux or Mac systems as I don’t have them but if you want to give me one I would be happy to write up a document like this for those systems.

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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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