Tutorials

Aero Peek is another nice Windows 7 feature that makes use of the “Aero” effects along with Aero Snap and Aero Shake. When you hover your mouse over the small rectangle found at the right extreme of your taskbar, you will see the desktop with the outlines of the active application windows s shown above. However, if you don’t use it much, you would like to disable it. Here are the two simple ways in which you can do it,

1. Right-click on the Taskbar and choose “Properties”.

2. Under the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” window, uncheck against “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop”.

Click “OK” button to save the settings and close the window.

The “Aero Peek” effects should now be disabled. There’s another alternative away you can achieve the same.

1. Right-click on the Computer link on your Start Menu and choose “Properties”.

2. A new window will open up. Click on the “Advanced system settings” in the left side pane.

3. In the new “System Properties” window, click on the “Settings” button under the “Performance” tab.

4. Under the  “Visual Effects” tab in the “Performance Options” window, scroll down until you find “Enable Aero Peek” option. Uncheck against and click “OK” to apply the settings and close the settings window.

That is it! You have now disabled the Aero Peek in your Windows 7. To enable it again, just check the option back again in method 1 or method 2.

If you own a multi-user computer, you will always feel the necessity to password protect your important data so that other users will not have a direct access to it. If you want to lock or password protect your folders, consider using this free software (Secure Folder) to do it. It is easy to configure and use. However, if you are one of those who thinks you get all these sort of things worked on your Windows with tweaks, here is a classic (has been around since the days of Windows XP!) trick which allows you to lock (using a password) and make the folder invisible in Windows 7, Windows Vista and of course Windows XP. Follow these steps:

Steps:

1. Open notepad and type the following code saved in this text file.

4. Now double-click on the .bat file that you have just saved. A new “Private” folder will be created.

5. Copy and paste all your private and important data to this “Private” folder.

6. Now again double-click on the batch (.bat) file. A command prompt window will ask you for confirmation. Press “y” to continue.

7. The “Private” folder will go missing this time and you can only find the .bat file.

If you have enabled the “Folder Options” to show the hidden files, you will an empty “Control Panel” system folder.

8. To get the folder back, double-click the .bat file again and you will be asked to enter the password that you have set in the step 2.

The “Private” folder re-appears again!

You can see that the trick actually works but there’s a small catch. Anyone can open the above batch file in a text editor and can actually see the password that you had entered. Hence we’ll try to convert this batch file to an .exe (executable) file so that it can’t be opened it in text editor.

To workaround this issue, download this Batch to Exe file converter and convert the above .bat file to an .exe file. That is it!

Windows always has unique styles of system sounds for various events since very long. Windows 7 just gets better in this aspect with addition of even more sound schemes. The system sounds for various events in Windows 7 are really great and they usually change whenever you change settings like changing Windows theme. Personally I’m very much impressed with these sounds and not really willing to change them. But you know, customization is the most fun part of Windows 7 and you might want to know how to apply a custom sound to a system event (program event). Follow these steps to learn about how to change these sound settings.

Steps:

1. Search “sounds” in the Start Menu search and click “Change system sounds” from the results under “Control Panel” section.

2. A new Sound settings window will open up.

3. Select a sound scheme from the list which you want to edit:

You can then select and test sounds for various program events. Click on “Test” button to preview the sound. To change the sound for a particular program event, click the “Browse…” button to browse a custom .wav (wave music format) music file from your computer to replace it with any other custom sound track.

Ensure that you preview the sound before applying the customized sound track to any program event. Click “OK” to apply the sound track.

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.