Tutorials

Windows Contacts is a nice little feature that lets you create contacts for people and organizations to keep track of them in your computer. You can create a dedicated contact for one person or organization. All Windows Contacts added here will automatically serve as address book for Windows Mail, meaning that you can choose the recipient from this Contacts folder.

All the details in the Contacts folder can also serve as multi-purpose contacts and contain various information including E-mail addresses, picture, phone numbers, street addresses, family information, website addresses, notes etc.

You can also synchronize Windows Contacts to your mobile phone or vice-versa. Nokia and Samsung mobile phones support contacts in vCard(.vcf) and CSV format and Sony Ericsson mobile phones support .contact format. The good thing with Windows Contacts is that you can export all the contacts inside this folder to the above formats.

To open Contacts folder in your Windows, go to Start Menu, and type “contacts” in the search box and open the Contacts from the results.

Click on “New Contact” link below the location bar in the Window to create a new contact.

Add as much details as you can, you can even add a picture to it:

That’s it. Now you have successfully created a new contact in the Windows Contacts. Add as many contacts as you can, and you will be ready use to these contacts with Windows Mail or sync with your mobile phone and other supported devices.

Remember the pretty useful “Show Desktop” icon that used to be present on the quick launch toolbar in Windows XP?

It was the life saviour for many users like me when I quickly wanted to open my desktop with too many windows being kept open. Fast forward to 2010. Most of us are now using Windows 7, the most successful Windows OS after Windows XP. Microsoft, desperate to decrease the amount of space occupied by icons like these, has removed this button from the original position altogether. Instead, Windows 7 came with a small rectangular blank button on the far right of the taskbar next to the clock. When you hover the mouse on this button will hide all the open windows quickly to shows up the desktop. If you have enabled Aero effects, you will see ghosted outlines of the windows, a part of the Windows 7’s “Aero Peck”.

You can also get to the desktop anytime using Windows Key + D shortcut, besides choosing “Show the desktop” from the context menu that appears when you right-click on the taskbar. Despite all these options, you might still have a liking for that old XP style “Show desktop” icon on the quick launch toolbar. Even though it’s a bit difficult to add such a shortcut or icon to the quick launch bar in Windows 7, you can still add this “Show Desktop” shortcut to your Start Menu to for a quicker access. Here is what you need to do:

1. Open notepad (or any text editor for that matter) and type the following code:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

2. Click File> Save As and choose “All Files (*.*)” from “save as type” and give “Show Desktop.scf” as the file name.

3. Drag the file to the Start Menu and release it to have it pinned to the Start Menu as shown:

That’s it! The “Show Desktop” shortcut comes to your Start Menu.

Note:

1. This guide also works for Windows XP and Windows Vista based computers. You might want to implement this guide to restore “Show Desktop” icon in case it goes missing from your quick launch bar.

Do you frequently move files to a particular folder or location on your computer? Wish you could have an easy way to quickly transfer a file to that location? Yes, Windows does have a solution for you, in the form of “Send to” menu list found in the right-click context menu of any folder.

This tutorial explains about how you can add or delete items from the “Send to” menu list in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Steps:

1. Navigate to the following folder in Windows:

Windows XP users:

C:\Documents and Settings\(User-name)\SendTo

Windows Vista & Windows 7 users:

C:\Users\(User-name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Where “User-name” stands for the Windows username with which you are logged in.

2. You will find all the shortcuts that are included in the “Send to” list in this folder. Add whatever shortcut t(program or folder) hat you would like to have it in the “Send to” in the right-click context menu or delete the item which you don’t want to see in the “Send to” menu option.

3. For instance, I have added a nee shortcut for “Techrena’ folder inside the “Send to” list as shown:

and it’ll appear in the “Send to” list in the right-click context menu as shown:

Isn’t that simple? Now go and play around with the Send to items in your Windows (XP/ Vista/ Windows 7).

Windows 7 has a small folder icon pinned to the taskbar (or you can add it manually*)  which indicates the shortcut for the “Windows Explorer”. Clicking on it will open the “Libraries” folder by default as shown.

But in most of the cases, you might want this to open a default folder other than the “Libraries” folder. Use the following trick to customize any Windows Explorer shortcut to open it with a custom folder of your choice in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

* This tutorial assumes that you have a pinned shortcut for the Windows Explorer on your taskbar. To pin the Windows explorer the shortcut to the taskbar, just drag and drop the “Computer” entry found in the Start menu. This guide works well for all types of shortcuts for the Windows Explorer. You can also add a desktop shortcut for the windows explorer on your desktop. To do this, search “explorer” in the Start menu and drag the “Windows Explorer” result to the desktop.

Steps:

1. Right-click on the folder icon at the taskbar:

4. Now go back to the “Properties” window that is kept open in the step 2, choose “Shortcut” tab and focus on the “Target” field. By default, it would have the following path:

%windir%\explorer.exe

5. Select the “Target” filed and paste the address that you copied from the step 3. For “My Documents”, it would be this string

%windir%\explorer.exe Libraries\Documents”::{031E4825-7B94-4DC3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}\Documents.library-ms”

6. Click on “OK” to apply and save the settings.

Target strings for other destinations:

Computer: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /E,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Set the above string under Target filed to open “Computer” by default in Windows Explorer.

From now on, when you double click on this Windows Explorer shortcut, it will open the custom folder that you set.

Related: Pin Computer Icon To Windows 7 Taskbar

Menu bar is that small bar having options like “File”, “Edit”, “View”, “Tools” and “Help” in Windows explorer. One can find it always in the top of any window s explorer window in the Windows XP and earlier versions, however Microsoft had started to hide this menu bar ever since the Windows Vista was launched owing to save some space in Windows explorer. Windows 7 and Vista users can always easily toggle between turning the menu bar on or off by pressing the “Alt” key.

But fortunately Windows 7 has added a feature to let users choose to enable or disable the menu bar in windows explorer. If you are very much used to Windows XP-like environment in windows explorer, you might fancy to have the menu bar permanently appear in Windows 7. Here is how you can turn on the menu bar forever in Windows 7.

1. Open windows explorer (press Start button + E).

2. Click Organize at the top of the window.

3. Expand “Layout” options and select “Menu bar” from the list.

That’s it, the menu bar will start appear in all windows explorer windows from now on.

Earlier this month, we had covered in an article about how to remove “Favorites” from the Navigation pane in Windows 7. Sometimes you don’t want to remove them completely, all you want is to customize them by renaming “Favorites”. Fortunately, this can be done with simple tweaks in Windows 7. Let’s get started on how you can rename “Favorites” in the Windows 7 explorer.

Steps:

1. Type regedit in the Start menu search bar and open “regedit.exe”. Click Yes when prompted by the UAC.

2. Navigate to the following path in the Registry Editor:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{323CA680-C24D-4099-B94D-446DD2D7249E}

3. Right-click on {323CA680-C24D-4099-B94D-446DD2D7249E} folder and choose “Permissions…”

4. Click on the Advanced button in the Permissions window. It will now open another dialogue box.

5. Go the Owner tab in the dialogue box. Select your Administrator account. Click OK to save the changes.

6. In the Permissions window, select your username from the list and check against Allow button right next to “Full Control” option. Click OK button to close the window.

6. On the left hand side pane, double click on the “LocalizedString” registry key.

You can give it any name that you wish, be it “PC Locations”, “Personal Favs”, “Important Folders”..etc., whatever .

8. Click OK to save the settings. Close the Registry Editor. Restart the Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) process to see the change.

You can see how “Favorites “being renamed to “My Locations” in Windows 7 explorer’s Navigation pane in the above screenshot.

To set the back the defaults, just go to step 7 and change the Value data field to the default value “@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21796”.

As part of tweaking the Navigation pane in Windows 7 explorer series, we have already discussed about removing “Favorites” from the windows explorer navigation pane. If you don’t use the “Libraries” much, you might also want to hide this from showing up. Now let’s look into how to remove “Libraries” from the windows 7 explorer.

Method-I

Steps:

1. Press Start button + R to open the run command bar. Type “regedit” in the filed and hit enter to open the registry editor.

2. Navigate to the following address in the Registry Editor.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{031E4825-7B94-4DC3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}\ShellFolder

3. You need special permissions to change the values inside this folder. To get permissions, right-click on the “ShellFolder” and click Permissions.

4. In the next step, check under the Allow option right next to Full Control for the user name “Administrators”. Click OK to close the window and you would be back in your Registry Editor.

5. Double click on the Attributes registry DWORD.

7. Click OK to save the changes and close the Registry Editor.

Now you would find that the “Libraries” link from the Navigation pane disappeared as shown.

If you want to get it back, just go back to the step 6 and change the value data back to the default b080010d .

Method II: The Easy Way

If you don’t want to go through all the above hassles, we have a much simpler solution for you. Just download the following file:

Disable Libraries In Explorer

Once you download the above .reg file, right-click on it and choose “merge” and that’s it, restart the explorer by following the step 8 and step 9 and you will no longer see the Libraries in the Navigation pane.

To get back the Libraries into your Windows 7 explorer, download the following file,

Enable Libraries In Explorer

Right-click on it and select merge. The Libraries will again start to appear once you restart the explorer.