bharath

Unlike the earlier Windows versions, the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 has been revamped a bit to make it appealing to the users. Any Windows Explorer window in Windows 7 can have at least 3 panes i.e., Navigation Pane, Preview Pane and Details Pane. For Library folder, there would be an additional pane called Library Pane which would be displayed at the top just below the address bar.

For now, we are concerned about the Details Pane. It is the pane that appears at the bottom of the window and displays the important information about the file or folder selected. While it is enabled by default in Windows 7 and Vista, some may find it missing in their explorer windows. In case it is disabled, this is how you can enable the Details Pane again:

Steps:

1. Open any Windows Explorer window.

2. Click on the Organize button and from the drop down menu, roll over to the “Layout” and select “Details pane”

3. You should now see the Details Pane at the bottom of your Windows Explorer window as shown in the screenshot.

Working on your notebook which is having a pretty high battery life? And wonder why you are being notified even when you have pretty much time left to plug into an AC power supply?

Windows takes into account the average laptops with battery lives around 2-4 hours and Microsoft has accordingly set the battery levels after which the users get notified and eventually pushing Windows into Hibernate mode after reaching a critical stage. But if you consider the case of the users with long battery backups, they would still be having more than enough time to save their current work, get plugin the power supply to the laptop. So if you are once such user, you might want to change the low battery actions on your laptop. Before that, let’s see what are the different battery levels considered by your Windows OS.

>> Low battery level is where you will laptop starts showing the first low battery notification and the low battery level usually lies in the range of 10-12%.

>> Reserve battery level is where your Windows starts acting and gets ready for hibernating, in most cases it will be around 7-8% lying closer to the critical battery level.

>> Critical battery level is where your laptop goes into Hibernation mode immediately and it’ll be around 5% in general.

Now that you have got the basic idea about different battery levels, let’s get into to details of changing the low battery notifications in Windows 7.

Steps:

1. Type “power options” in the Start Menu search and open the first result under the Control Panel section.

2. Now select the power plan for which you want to change the low battery notification settings, and click the “Change plan settings” link found next to the power plan.

3. In the “Edit Plan Settings” window, click on the “Change advanced power settings” link found at near the bottom.

4. Scroll down to “Battery” section in the Advanced settings tab and click the “+” button to expand it.

5. You may adjust the settings for each of the battery levels i.e Low battery level, Reserve battery level and Critical battery level.

Click “OK” once you are done to apply the settings. That’s it.

If you are using Windows 7 you might have noticed the Windows Aero Shake effect. Just hold down a window on its title bar and shake it back and forth and you will notice that all the other windows will be minimized. I’m sure you must have noticed this, but chances are that you might not be aware that this is due to an special Windows 7 Aero effect called Windows Shake. Windows Shake is part of the Aero effects in Windows 7 alongside Aero Peek and Aero Snap. Watch the following video to know about Aero Shake.

For some reasons, if you want to disable Aero Shake feature for your Windows, here are the two ways in which you can do it.

1. Press Windows + R button to open the RUN command.

2. Type “regedit” in the text field and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.

3. In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

4. Right-click on the “Windows” main key and choose New > Key from the context menu to create a new key with name “Explorer”.

And it should look like this:

5. Now in the right hand side pane under the newly created “Explorer” key, right-click and choose “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value”.

6. Name it as “NoWindowMinimizingShortcuts” and set its value to 1 as shown:

That is it. Just log off from your account and log back in and you will learn that the Aero Shake has been disabled. To enable the Aero Shake again, just delete the DWORD that you have just created.

If you are on Windows Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate editions you have access to the Local Group Policy Editor and it is relatively easy to achieve the same settings vis GPEDIT.

Steps:

1. Press Windows button + R to open the RUN dialog box and enter “gpedit.msc” in the text field and hit enter.

2. Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Desktop in the local group policy editor.

3. On the right-hand side pane, find an entry named “Turn off Aero Shake window minimizing mouse gesture”. Double-click on the entry to configure the settings.

4. Select the “Enabled” option and click “OK” to apply the settings.

The changes will be in action immediately and the Aero Shake will be disabled.

If you are on Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic or Home Premium editions, you must use the method-1. If you are on Windows 7 editions other than the above mentioned ones, we suggest you to go with the method-2.