How To

Windows Search has been modified and improved a lot since Windows Vista and is much better in the case of Windows 7. Windows Search is by default turned on all machines running Windows. If you prefer to use a third-party search application instead of Windows Search, you might want to disable the Windows Search so that it doesn’t interfere in the working of the third-party application. Read the following guide to learn how to turn off the Windows Search.

Steps:

1. Open Control Panel from the link in the Start Menu.

2. Click On “Programs” link on the Control Panel items.

3. Click on “Turn Windows features on or off” link under “Programs and Features”.

[You can also open the same by searching “Windows features” in the Start Menu and then by opening the “Windows Features”.]

Uncheck in the checkbox against “Windows Search” and you would be presented with a warning. Click Yes to continue.

5. Click “OK” button to apply the settings.

It may take several minutes for Windows to make changes to the Windows Features.

6. You need to restart your computer to see the changes in action.

When you see your computer after the reboot, you will find that all the search boxes in Windows are gone! There won’t be search boxes in the Start Menu, Windows Explorer, Control Panel and Libraries.

If you want to turn the Windows Search feature on, just go back to the step 4 and check the “Windows Search” option to enable it again.

Have you ever wondered how could I keep my most frequently used folder at the top in any Windows Explorer window?

As all of us know, the folders inside any Windows Explorer window are by default sorted by name (alphabetical). So a folder like “important” would always gets listed down in order than say some folder like “abc”.

If you can see in the above screenshot, our motto is to get the “important” folder up in the order, right at the top of the list. One simple workaround to get this done is to add some symbols on your keyboard like ~, `, !, #, ^ etc to the folder names that you want to see atop. However please be aware that you can not use symbols like \, /, :, *, ?, “, <, >, | because Windows doesn’t allow these strings to be present in the names of the folders.

Try using different symbols in order to use multiple sticky folders at the top of the Windows Explorer. If you use same symbol for any two folders, they are still going to be sorted by their names as shown:

Avoid using digits instead of symbols as the whole name looks a bit cluttered if you prepend a numbers like 1, 2, 3 etc. at the beginning of the name of the file.

[via] Labnol

“Aero Snap” is a new feature introduced in Windows 7 as part of the windows management. In short what it does is when you drag a window to the top or towards the side of the screen, it gets maximized (when dragged to top) or resized (when dragged to side) automatically to fit that portion of the screen.

The minor problem here is when you want to hide the window by dragging it to the side of the screen, it gets resized instead. Also this is also a worthless feature of you use multiple monitors. Whatever may be the reason, just in case if you want to disable this feature, read the following guide:

1. Type “ease of access” in the Start Menu search and open the result from the Programs section.

You may also open the Ease Of Access Center from the Control Panel menu.

2. In the Ease Of Access Center, scroll down and click “Make the mouse easier to use”

3. A new window (Control Panel \ Ease of Access \ Ease of Access Center \ Make the mouse easier to use) will open up.

Scroll down to the bottom of the window, where you will see “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen”. Check against it and click OK to apply the settings and close the window.

That’s it. You have just turned off the Aero Snap on your Windows 7. To enable the Aero Snap feature back on your computer, just uncheck the option in the step 3.

Offline Files is a cool feature available in Windows since the days of Windows XP which allows you to see the files shared over a network even when you are not connected to the network. When you enable offline files, it will tell the Windows to store a local copy of the files on your computer so that you can access them even when you are away from the network. Later, when you come back on to the network, these files will get synchronized with the server to update to the latest version of the files. Follow this guide to enable the Offline Files on your Windows 7 machine.

Please note that the “Offline Files” feature is not available in Windows 7 Starter and Home Premium editions.

Steps:

1. Type “offline” in the Start Menu search and open the first result from the Control Panel section:

2. Click “Enable offline files” in the Offline Files window and click OK to apply the changes.

3. And you will now be prompted to restart your computer before these changes could be applied on your machine.

Choose Yes to restart your machine and check back to see the offline files being enabled for you:

Quick Launch Bar that used to exist in Windows until Windows Vista was offering an easy way to quickly start a program from the Windows taskbar. However, this feature has been disabled (or ‘hidden’, I would rather prefer to say) in Windows 7. This is due to the latest improvements in Windows 7 that let you to directly pin the programs to the Taskbar for quicker and direct launch. But sooner or later you will understand that if you go on pinning programs to the Taskbar, you would probably left with very little space on your taskbar. Quick Launch Bar has an advantage here as it won’t occupy much space. Anyway if you are all for Quick Launch Bar and want to enable or disable it in Windows 7, here is how you have to do it:

1. Right-click on the Windows 7 Taskbar and choose Toolbars> New toolbar..

2. A new file browser window will be opened. Copy the following path and paste it into the “Folder” filed click “Select Folder”.

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

3. Now you will notice the new Quick Launch Bar being added to the Taskbar, just before the System Clock in the system tray.

Clicking on the arrows icon next to the Quick Launch Bar would open the list of programs that are currently added to the Quick Launch Bar. So you need to open the list and then click the program to run it. Let’s see how can we make this even simpler, to quickly open the programs in the Quick Launch Bar.

4. Right-click on the Taskbar and uncheck against “Lock the taskbar”.

5. Now you’ll notice that you can actually move the Quick Launch Bar to adjust its position.

Just drag it a bit forward to show the program icons in the Quick Launch Bar as shown:

If you want further customization, you can right-click on the Quick Launch Bar position and deselect “Show Title” and then lock the taskbar to see all the Quick Launch Bar icons placed next to each other in a line.

If you want to disable or hide the Quick Launch Bar from the Windows 7 Taskbar, right-click on the taskbar, Toolbars> ..and deselect Quick Launch from the context menu.

Windows 7 taskbar is really handy and as you might be knowing it allows you to just drag and pin any program shortcut to the taskbar. But have you ever tried pinning the “Computer” shortcut from desktop to the taskbar in Windows 7? Does it get pinned to it? No, right? This what you will end when you try to pin it to the taskbar:

It gets pinned to the “Windows Explorer” and it’ll be shown above the jump lists as shown in the above screenshot. Oh no, wait! not exactly where we wanted it to be! No compromise, we just want it to be pinned to the taskbar no where else! Oh no, problem, problem, problem!!

We are here for you. In this tutorial we are going to talk about workaround to pin the Computer icon to the taskbar. Let’s get started !

Steps:

1. Create a new shortcut on your desktop: Right-click on your desktop and choose New > Shortcut.

2. In the next “Create Shortcut” window, paste the following string:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:MyComputerFolder

Click “Next” button at the bottom of the window

3. Name the shortcut. You can type any name for the shortcut and click “Finish” button to finish the wizard.

4. Now you will have a shortcut for “My Computer” created on your desktop.

5. Now we are going to change the icon for the shortcut and get the original icon (computer) that is normally associated with “My Computer”.

To do this, right-click on the shortcut and select “Properties”.

6. Go to the “Shortcut” tab in the “Properties” window and click “Change Icon”.

7. Paste the following string in the “Look for icons in this file” field and press Enter.

%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll

Select the “Computer” icon and click OK.

8. Click OK to close the Properties window.

9. Now try dragging the shortcut to the taskbar and it works!!

You will now have the Computer icon pinned to the Taskbar as shown in the above pic. If you liked this post then chances are that you might also want to checkout Start Windows Explorer With Custom Folder