Windows 7

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.

Windows 7 has many lesser-known features and “Reliability Monitor” is one such feature. Reliability Monitor, a handy tool for diagnosing when a particular event was first occurred. It usually monitors five types of events:

>> Application failures

>> Windows failures

>> Miscellaneous failures

>> Warnings

>> Information

To see the Reliability History for your Windows, go to Start Menu and type “reliability” in the search box and click “View reliability history” from the results under “Control Panel” section.

You will see a graph divided into weeks (or days) showing the all the different types of events that are recorded.

Critical errors are displayed with icon , Warnings with and information messages with .

While you can safely ignore the information messages, you should look deeply into the critical errors and warnings. If you are encountering any serious issue with your Windows, and decide to trouble shoot it, the first place you should visit is this as you can get an idea of exactly when the problem has started. The monitored events mostly include processes that stopped working, errors when windows was not properly shut down, unsuccessful application installations and driver installations etc.

You can right-click on any critical event to check for a solution for that event. If you are connected to internet Windows will automatically look for a solution and will save it in the Windows 7 action center.

If you view the technical details of the problem, you will get some important details like error code for the issue with which is pretty much useful in troubleshooting the problems.

Reliability monitor and reliability history is also available in Windows Vista.

Do you use this tool much? How far has this tool been useful to you? Do let us know though comments..

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.