Unhappy with the way the shortcut icons on your desktop look? Here is a quick way to change them to a different icon included in XP.
Here I have a shortcut to a folder of batch files boring old shortcut.
Now right click the shortcut folder icon and choose Properties. In the Shortcut Properties window select the Shortcut tab and the Change Icon button.
You can scroll through the included icons in XP and select the one you want to use. I try to select one that I will remember what it is for. It seems to make navigating through tons of folders easier. Especially if there are a few I use a lot. In this example I made it a star … no reason other than to demonstrate.
In my next post I will show you how to customize the desktop icons to your liking.
If you have never used the “Map Network Drive” dialog box, do you ever wonder how to get rid of it? Personally I only map drives from the command line so I never use it either… so I’m thankful there’s a registry hack that can remove the menu items.
The default method of opening unknown files forces you to go through a list of known applications and is generally a pain to deal with. That’s why I like to have a context menu option for “Open with Notepad” so that I can quickly open up files without having to go through a lot of trouble.
After writing the article last week about disabling SuperFetch, my good friend Daniel Spiewak commented that SuperFetch “loads the wrong thing more often than not”, which reminded me of a registry tweak… You can tell Windows to only cache the boot processes instead of everything.
It seems like everybody uses the free PuTTY client for accessing SSH from Windows, but the lack of a tabbed interface has kept me using the commercial SecureCRT application for years… until now.
If you’ve ever worked on a document originally created by somebody else, you’ll most likely immediately be frustrated by their horrible choice of fonts and formatting. What you might not realize is that the search and replace functionality in Word allows you to replace more than just text.
Have you ever wondered why Windows XP had such terribly ugly wallpapers to choose from? On top of that, there’s no way to easily change the list of backgrounds to a folder you might actually use… like your My Pictures folder.
If there’s one thing that drives me crazy about using multiple operating systems, it’s the inconsistency in keyboard shortcuts… when you hit the backspace key in Firefox on Windows it normally goes back to the previous page, but it doesn’t on Ubuntu Linux.
The SuperFetch service in Windows Vista preloads your system’s memory with the applications that you use most often. This makes launching of those applications much faster, but it might be an unwanted behavior for system tweakers or gamers.
I am not a fan of the delay that can occur between clicking the start menu and waiting for it to display. Here is a quick Registry tweak that will allow for the start menu to display more quickly
If you have an issue with your system clock losing time, you’ve probably had to go and re-sync your clock with the internet time servers. The problem is that there are just way too many clicks required to get to the right screen, so the command line is much simpler.
