Windows Tools, Help & Guides

We love customising our desktops at mintywhite.  Our community have come up with some brilliant creations and provided links to some great resources.

In this How To guide I will be showing you how to create your own Start Orb for Windows 7.  I’ll be using Photoshop CS5.  Sorry to those who use alterative software.  I’m sure you’ll be able to follow using your preferred software however.

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I lost count (okay so it was only about 8 or 9 times) of the times people asked, in college, how my laptop stayed on when I closed the lid and moved to a different room or table. If you are in school or use your laptop and have to get up and move regularly, it can be a pain to:

• Attempt to carry your laptop with the screen open.
• Put your laptop on standby, walk for a couple of minutes, and then bring your laptop back out of standby.

This guide helps you learn how to keep your laptop running when you close the lid in Windows 7.

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If you use the Control Panel frequently, you may have noticed you can’t right click the shortcut in the start menu and click Pin to Taskbar. In this guide, I’ll show you how to pin the Control Panel to the taskbar and then pin your favorite apps for quick access.

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There are several folders in your computer that can increase size without you having knowledge of it. It’s very common that programs use temporary files. Every browser also uses caches and cookies.

The Folders

Some of these applications don’t delete these files after they are used. In this post I am going to explain how to obtain information about the size of the following folders:

Temporary Folder

This folder which is usually located at “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp” is used for almost every program to store its temporary files.

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If you share your PC with others or let friends use it when they come to visit, you may find that settings get changed, files deleted, programs installed etc. without your consent. I used to use a program called Windows Steady State, which provided a mode to allow access without setting complicated policies to protect your settings. Thankfully in Windows 7, Microsoft have made this level of protection much more readily accessible. Learn, in this guide how to set up a Guest account, which is available in all Windows 7 versions, for infrequent users of your PC.

Please note two things before getting started:

1. You should not use a guest account if you have parental controls set on your children’s accounts.
2. You cannot use Guest mode in an AD environment.

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In a lot of the guides on this site, we ask you to show hidden files. If you are not sure of how to do this, this guide is for you.

Although the interface of Windows has changed since Windows XP, the steps taken to show hidden files are the same for Windows XP, Vista, and 7. I’ved used XP for the screenshots in this guide.

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