Tips and tricks

[ainwood]

Thought it might be useful to keep a list of PC tips and tricks for various things. If there's enough interest, I'll maintain this post as a directory. If there's not, it will die as it sinks down the page....



Windows General

1. "No To All"
2. Selection of hotkeys / shortcuts (minimising all windows, run explorer etc)
3. Delete, instead of send to recycle bin.
4. Tweak UI (invaluable for customising windows)
5. Wintop - CTRL-ALT-DELETE on acid!
6. Shut-down with a single click.

Windows XP / 2000

1. Get rid of balloon tips in XP
2. Reset admin password

Microsoft Word

1. "Paragraph test"

Internet Browsers

1. Automatically add www or .com to a search bar entry.

 

[ainwood]

Windows XP: No To All

from here.

Windows Tip: Say 'No to All' in Windows XP
written by Morgan Webb on Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Save time and clicks by telling your computer 'No to All' when copying duplicate files.


Here's the situation: You want to add a group of pictures you've been working on to your My Pictures folder, but your My Pictures folder already contains some, but not all, of those pictures. Instead of sorting out which are already in the folder and only moving the new ones, you can save time by just moving the whole lot of them and letting Windows XP figure out what is already there and what needs to be added.

Where's 'No to All?'

When you do this, XP will dutifully ask whether you want to replace or not replace any duplicate files. It'll give you these choices for the duplicates:

"Yes to All" (replace them all)
"Yes" (replace this particular one)
"No" (do not replace this particular one)


Where's the "No to All" option? It'd be great to have if you wanted to save time, or if you wanted to keep original versions of the files. In Windows XP, you don't have to click "No" for each duplicate file. Hold down Shift while you click "No," and that will act as if you had clicked a "No to All" option. It's a simple but cool little Windows XP secret.

This does not work in Windows 98 or earlier.

 

[Inter4]

Trick:

Type =rand(1,1) in a word sheet, press ENTER, and look what happens..

 

[Sanaz]

Two simple things that I use dozens of times every day, but which a lot of people don't know about:

1. When deleting one or more files in Windows, use Shift-Del to delete without sending to the trashcan. This saves the step of emptying the trashcan when finished, and the delete itself completes much more quickly.

2. When you enter a website in your browser (IE or Mozilla/Firefox, sorry Netscape/Opera users), use Ctrl-Enter to automatically add the "http://www." and ".com" to the link. This saves the time for the search to see what the browser thinks your intention was, and is easier than typing in the whole URL.

 

[Turner]

Quick Clearning the Desktop: WindowsKey-D. This minimizes all windows on the desktop immediately. Useful for when a program (such as Civ3) takes the full screen and you can't get to the icons on the desktop.

Bring up Windows Explorer: WindowsKey-E. Saves from having to Right-Click/Explore on My Computer (or other drive shortcut on the desk).

Bring Up Windows Search: WindowsKey-F. If you search for a lot of files on your desktop, or can't be troubled to click on Start/Search, this will bring up the file search box. You can also search the internet from here.

Bring Up System Properties: WindowsKey-Break/Pause. Saves you from having to Right Click on My Computer/Properties.

Quick-Lock the Desktop in WinXP: WindowsKey-L. Must have Ctrl-Alt-Del to login turned on.

Run a program via commandline: WindowsKey-R. This will bring up a dialog box asking you the name of a program to run. Also has a browse feature.

 

[ainwood]

Getting rid of balloon tips in XP:

If you're sick of those little baloon tips that keep telling you useful things like you're connected to the internet, these can be easily disabled.

Warning! If you're not comfortable with editing the registry, then don't do this!

Open the registry editor, and go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Set (or create) teh REG_DWORD value 'EnableBallonTips' as 0.

 

[anarchywrksbest]

For the non-XP versions of windows:

TWEAK UI
http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/powertoys/networking/nttweakui.asp

Don't ask me why microsoft never included this in the Windows package cause I don't know... well maybe they like making windows annoying and user-unfriendly?

Basically, it allows you to do good things to Windows default settings, like disable autorun, change desktop settings, alter the control panel. You can even tell it not to put "shortcut to blah" on new shortcuts and get rid of that arrow on a shortcut icon.

Wintop
http://www.dewassoc.com/support/useful/wintop.htm

Another useful feature that MS didn't include. Essentially it's ctrl+alt+del on acid. It lets you see the CPU usage of programs and when you tell one to terminate it will actually do it.

 

[Azadre]

In XP and maybe 2000

WindowKey + R (or start run) and enter 'control userpasswords2' to reset the adminstrator password. Useful for many situations.

 

[Inter4]

Useful if you're not the administrator..

 

[Azadre]

Useful if you're not the administrator..

Try it at a Machine running in a store... it always works.

 

[ainwood]

Shutdown windows with a single click

This tip will enable you to create buttons in your quick launch toolbar to quickly and easily shut down and/or restart your computer.

Right click on your desktop, scroll to new..... shortcut
In the location line, for shutdown type; shutdown -s -t 0 ie: shutdown(space)-s(space)-t(space)number zero
Name the shortcut "Shut Down PC" or whatever u want
The new shortcut is now sitting on your desktop, right click on it and go to properties, then click on "change icon". Click OK, then pick a suitable icon, there is a red "off button" icon available, then click apply and ok.
Now drag the icon from your desktop into the quick launch toolbar, resize the toolbar so all the buttons are visible, then delete the shortcut from your desktop.
To create a restart button the location line should read shutdown -r -t 0 name it restart pc and give it a suitable icon for restart.

Now you can shut down or restart your pc in 1 mouse click without having to go through the startup menu.

 

[Syterion]

Ainwood, your above tip doesn't work for me. I tried it and typed in the location line "shutdown -s -t 0", but it said The file "shutdown couldn't be found. I have windows 2000, BTW.

 

[ainwood]

I had some 'working' code for this, but couldn't find it to post it, so got this off a website. I'll try to find the original - it worked!

 

[Chairman Meow]

The shutdown command may only work on XP. I just tried it on Windows 2000 and it didn't work.

 

[Jeratain]

If you are running Windows XP and have SP2 installed:
Right click My Computer and go to Properties.
On the Advanced tab click on the Settings button in the Preformance area.
You should have a new third tab Data Execution Prevention.

I recommend choosing the "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except thos I select:" option.

What is DEP you ask?

Hardware DEP
The hardware version, is only available on a small number of systems. The idea is that hardware and software work together to protect critical parts of the kernel memory space (stack, heap, etc) so that when a buffer overrun occurs (this does not prevent overruns) the portion of memory that could otherwise be executed is non-executable (this is way over simplified). The idea is to minimize the impact of malicious code.
All the "Palladium" stuff people have been railing about....this is the first part of it.

Software DEP
Third party tools have been around do to this on Windows Systems for some time (StackDefender, Overflow Guard, etc). The idea is that you add software items to the kernel that have various ways of monitoring the memory space to try to prevent overrun execution. This is weaker than hardware DEP but does offer some good protections.

So that is the basics, by default the software DEP in SP2 is on for Windows and its services. You can optionaly turn on DEP for all software (which I recommend), and then exempt any programs you need that happen to fail due to it. The cool thing is when an app fails you will get information about the app and the vendor may already have a fix. The error looks a lot like a dr watson error that you have all probably seen but has a DEP title bar.

This isn't really a trick - it's more of a must-do option if you care about security.