Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you have downloaded the free books from Windows Guides (or any PDF) and it won’t open, you may see any of the following messages:

• Invalid Adobe PDF
• Error Locating Object Handler
• Adobe reader could not open the file ‘ABC.pdf’ because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been corrupted (for example it has been sent as an email attachment and wasn’t correctly decoded
• An Internal Error Occurred
• Other obscure and unhelpful messages

This guide will take you through basic troubleshooting steps you can use to view PDF files that seem to work for every one else but you.
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Are you a regular user of the Event Viewer in Windows 7? Ever wonder why Microsoft haven’t programmed it to clear itself after a certain amount of entries or time?

As it stands right now, I have tens of thousands of entries in the Event Viewer which is unnecessary and bogs down the loading time. Maybe for a corporate administrator this is required but for average Joe, it isn’t.

What is the Event Viewer?

“Windows NT has featured event logs since its original release in 1993. Applications and operating system components can make use of this centralized log service to report events that have taken place, such as a failure to start a component or complete an action. The system defines three log sources:

• “System”
• “Application”
• “Security”

Microsoft intends the System and Application log sources for use by the Windows operating system and Windows applications respectively. Only the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (lsass.exe) can directly write to the Security log.”

With that out of the way, on with the guide to show you how to clear the Event Viewer.
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I love Windows 7, I think it’s a great operating system.  There are a few things however that I do not like.

This guide is going to show you how you can remove the Screen resolution, Gadgets & Personalize from the Desktop context menu.

I really can’t understand why MS have put these two here. Especially Screen resolution, once you’ve set your resolution, under most circumstances you’ll likely never click it again (to be honest, you probably didn’t use it in the first place), why put it pride of place in this context menu?  Surely other commands would be much more useful.  Restarting Explorer for perhaps?

I’m not a lover of gadgets either, I like a nice clean Desktop to work in.  This context menu item for me, has to go.

For anyone who is the same as me and can’t understand why these 2 entries are here and too, have no need for them and want to remove them, you’ve come to the right place!

This guide involves editing the registry, please see here before modifying it at all.

Usually all we would have to do is delete a key or two from the registry.

This guide is a little more involved however and requires permission changes to the registry.  Sounds scary I know but as long as you’ve had a look here, understand the risks and follow the guide to a tee, all will be fine and dandy! Read the rest of this entry »

One of the better improvements to the Windows 7 taskbar is the thumbnail preview – at least that’s my opinion. I also like the group function and that I can close a running application directly from the thumbnail view. However, should you for any reason want to disable the Thumbnails, here is how to do so.

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In a Previous post we showed you how to add CopyTo and MoveTo functions to the Context Menu (Read it Here).

One of our readers asked:
“Where would one find the values associated with different functions?
What other kinds of functions could be added in this manner?”

Well, Alan – I think I’ve just come up with an answer.

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Windows easy transfer is designed to help you get your settings from your old PC to your shiny, new PC. in this guide I’ll show you how to get your old PC setup for transfer, via  a USB drive/external hard drive, and then show you how to transfer the files to your new PC.

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