Windows 7

Run Command in Windows is so handy to run programs and other commands quickly. Even though it has lost it’s charm a bit in Vista and Windows 7 due to the wonderful “search and run” addition to the Start Menu, it still does hold it’s prominence among users who are used to it from the days of Windows XP.

By default RUN command option is hidden in Start Menu for Windows 7 and Vista and one needs to either press Windows Key + R or search for “run’ in the Start Menu and press enter to open the RUN command. Fortunately Windows 7 and Vista allow you to add  this “RUN” command button to the Start Menu for quicker access. Here are the two ways in which you can add this button.

Method-1:

1. Right-click on Start Menu and click “Properties”.

2. In the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” window, click on “Customize” option found under the “Start Menu” tab as shown:

3. A new window will open up, scroll down the list until you find “Run Command” option. Just check against it and click OK.

4. Click OK in the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” window to save the settings and close the window. You will now find the “Run..” command option right inside the Start Menu as shown in the screenshot below:

Method-2: Using Registry Editor:

1. Type “regedit” in the Start Menu search bar and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.

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

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

3. On the right side pane, look for a key named “Start_ShowRun” :

4. Double-click on the key to change it’s DWORD value. Enter “1” in the “Value data” field and click OK.

5. Close the Registry Editor and as usual Logoff and log back into notice the change (you may instead restart your explorer.exe process as well). Your Start Menu should showup the “Run..” button as shown in the above pic.

Sometimes you will leave your system running for too much of time and later you forget for how much time you had kept it running like that. Wouldn’t it be just useful if we can find the exact system boot time or uptime (the amount of time for which your computer is running since it’s turned on) of your Windows?

Here are the simple tricks that you can use in your Windows 7 or Windows Vista based computers to find the system uptime or exact boot time.

Method-1: Using SystemInfo

Here we’ll make use of systeminfo command, using which we wrote a tutorial earlier to find the windows 7 original install date.

Type “cmd” in the Start Menu search bar and press enter to open the Command Prompt window. Type the following command in the cmd window and hit Enter:

Systeminfo | Find “Boot Time”

And you will see the System Boot Time in the next line in the CMD window as shown:

Once you know the boot time, you can easily calculate the System Up time or vice versa.

Method-2: Using Task Manager

Right-click on the taskbar and choose “Start Task Manager” to open the task manager. Alternatively you can press CTRL + SHIFT + ESC to open it directly.

Under the Performance tab, you will find Up Time being listed as shown:

As you can see from the above screenshot, Up Time for my system is shown as 0:08:47:31 which translates to 0 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes and 31 seconds.

Note:

These values turns up accurate only when you keep your system running. These values may deviate slightly from the actual values if your system goes to stand by mode or sleep mode in the middle.

All Programs in the Start Menu shows a list of all the programs installed in your Windows to open and run a particular program. It was an essential button in case of Windows XP and other older versions of Windows, but not so much when it comes to Windows Vista or Windows 7. You can use the Start Menu search to search and run a program immediately without navigating through the list of programs under “All Programs”. If you don’t use “All Programs” list much, you can always disable (or hide or remove) it from the Start Menu. I have provided here, the two ways of doing it. While the first method works only for Professional, Business and Ultimate editions of Windows 7, the second method (which uses registry hack) is universal and can be applied to all editions of Windows 7 (including Home Premium).

1. Press Start button + R to open the RUN dialog box, type “gpedit.msc” in the text field and press OK to open the Group Policy Editor.

2. Go to the following path in the Group Policy Editor:

Local Computer Policy > User Configuration > Star Menu and Taskbar

3. On the right side pane, find an entry by titled “Remove All Programs list from the Start Menu”.

4. Double-click on it to change the settings. Choose

Change the setting from to “Enabled” from the default value of “Not configured”.

5. Click “OK” to apply the changes and close the settings window.

Logoff from your user account and then log back in to see the change:

1. Press Start button + R to open the RUN and type “regedit” and press the Enter key to open the Registry Editor.

2. In the Registry Editor, find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3. On the right side pane, create a new 32-bit DWORD. To create one, right-click on the empty space on the right hand side and choose “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value”.

4. Name it as “NoStartMenuMorePrograms” as shown:

5. Double-click on the NoStartMenuMorePrograms and change its value data to “1” (the default value would be “0”).

6. Click OK to save the settings.

Logoff from your account and log back in to see the change as shown in the above pic.

To Undo The Change:

# Choose the setting for “Remove All Programs list from the Start Menu” to either “Not Configured” or “Disabled” in method-1.

# Change the Value data field back to “0” or completely delete the newly added NoStartMenuMorePrograms DWORD on the right side pane in case of method-2.

Windows 7 has a nice and handy toolbar in all explorer windows which contains the important commands that you can use on the files selected in the window. Only few options will be shown here and you need to right-click on the file to get all the possible commands in the context menu that you can use on the file.

Wouldn’t it be nicer if we have default commands like “Delete” permanently hooked to this explorer toolbar? Let’s see how to add “Delete” button to the Windows 7 explorer toolbar.

Steps:

1. Press Start button + R to open the RUN, type “regedit” in the text field and press OK or hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to the following path in the registry editor:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes

3. You need to take ownership for the following keys:

Right-click on the key and choose “Permissions”.

Then Click on “Advanced” button and head over to the “Owner” tab in the Advanced Security Settings window. Select your user account name and click OK to apply the settings changes.

Now, in the Permissions window, choose your user account and check against “Allow” field against “Full Control”checkbox.

Click OK to apply the changes and close the window. Repeat this for all of the keys mentioned above.

Adding Delete Windows Explorer Toolbar button

Right-click on the file and choose “Merge”.

5. Logout from your account and log back in or restart the explorer.exe process to observe the changes.

The “Delete” button from now on should appear in all of your Windows Explorer windows as shown in the above screenshot. This button will start appearing in all of the explorer Windows including Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos etc. and for all other folders as well.

Removing The Delete Button From The Explorer Toolbar:

To undo this change and revert back to the original settings, download and save the following registry file, right-click on it and choose “Merge” as said above.

Remove Delete Windows Explorer Toolbar button

Again, as said above, you need to logout and long back in or restart the windows explorer process to see the changes.

Note:

• In case you get the error during the “merge” operation after downloading the registry file in the step 4 or while removing the “Delete” button, it is to be understood that you haven’t taken ownership for all of the keys mentioned in the step 3.
• It is recommended that you take a backup of the registry before proceeding with editing the registry keys. Right-click on the “FolderTypes” hive and choose “Export’ to save a backup of the whole registry keys and sub-keys present in it.
• This registry hack works for Windows 7 only.
• The “Delete” button in the explorer toolbar only moves the files to the Recycle Bin. It will not delete the files for permanent in any case.

Do you want to prevent other users from shutting down your computer when you are away? Are you serving a server on your computer which needs to be up all the time and hence want to remove the Power button and other options including Shut Down, Restart, Sleep, and Hibernate from the Start Menu so that gets to difficult to turn off the system?

Whatever may be the reason, if you want to remove the Shut Down button et al., follow the steps discussed below. You have two methods to choose from: The first method is universal and applies to all the editions of Windows 7, while the second method is applicable to Professional, Business or Ultimate editions only.

Warning: If you have followed this tutorial and removed the “Shutdown” and “Restart” options from your Start Menu, the “Turn Off” option that would normally shows up when you hit CTR+ ALT+ DELETE would also go missing and the only way to shutdown your computer in such a case is to use the command line tool which can be a bit difficult. Try these methods only if you are really need to do so.

1. Press Windows key + R to open RUN and type “regedit” in the text field and press OK.

2. Navigate to the following path in the registry editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3. Right-click on the right side pane and choose New > “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.

4. Give it a name as “NoClose”.

5. Double-click on the newly created DWORD (NoClose) and change the “value data” to 1.

Click OK and close the registry editor. You might have to log out and then log back in or restart the “explorer” (kill explorer.exe and run it again using the task manager) to see the changes.

Group Policy Editor will not be present in the Windows 7 Home edition. So if you have other editions of Windows 7 like Professional, Ultimate or Business, you can proceed with this method which is relatively simpler than the first method.

1. Press Windows Key + R and type “gpedit.msc” in the text field and hit OK to open the Group Policy Editor.

2. Navigate to the following path:

Local Computer Policy > User Configuration > Star Menu and Taskbar

3. On the right side pane, you will find an entry “Remove access to the Shut Down, Restart, Sleep and Hibernate commands”.

Double-click on it to change the settings.

4. You need to change the option in settings window to “Enabled” from the default value “Not Configured”.

New setting:

Click OK to apply the changes and close the window. The changes can be seen immediately. The Power button and the Shut Down, Restart, Sleep, and Hibernate commands will be removed from the start menu as shown in this pic.

To undo this change:

Delete the NoClose DWORD entry in the method-1.

Change the value back to “disabled” or “not configured” in case of method-2.

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.