How To Optimize, Tweaks Windows In 40 Steps
- Today in this topic I’m going to show you how to make your Windows work as you want it to. These 40 ways tweaks will help you everything and identifying performance of your system.
“Customize”
1. Display Your Own Photo In A Screensaver
Creating a personalized photo screensaver will take about a seconds.
2. Change Your Drive Letters
3. Restore The Classic Start Menu
In Windows 7 you miss the old XP-style looks start menu, you can get it back using “CSMenu“. Install and run the program and it will add a new start button to the system Tray.
4. Create Floating Toolbars (Win XP)
If you have Quick Launch and Desktop toolbars turned on, the Taskbar in Windows XP can get a little crowded. Right-click the taskbar to unlock it and position your cursor over the dotted line on a toolbar. When the pointer changes shape, click and drag the toolbar, dropping it into position on your desktop. It will form a small floating window that you can then resize.
5. Change The Log-On Screen (Win 7)
Windows doesn’t allow us to customize the log-on screen that appears during start-up. However, you can change the screen with the aid of the Windows 7 Logon Background Changer . Choose any image and the program will resize it as necessary and apply the picture to the log-on screen without overwriting any system files.
6. Access Hidden Wallpapers (Win 7 )
Microsoft newest operating system comes with a collection of localized wallpapers. Go to Start, Control Panel and click the “Change Desktop Background” link under “Appearance and Personalization”. You will see a United Kingdom collection that includes stonehenge and Tower Bridge. Users in other countries have their own localized images. You can browse and add these by going to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT. The sub-folder contain images for Australia, Canada, Britian, America and South Africa.
7. Add Extra Clocks (Win Vista, 7)
8. Reduce The Border Size (Win Vista, 7)
In Windows Vista & 7 have quite chunky borders. To slim them down, right-click a blank area of Desktop and select Personalize . In Vista, click “Windows Color and Apperance” and than click Advanced . In Windows 7, click Windows Color, than click Advanced Appearance settings. Select Border Padding in the drop-down item menu.
9. Adjust Dual-Monitor Positioning (Win XP, Vista , 7)
If you use two differently sized monitors, moving your cursor from one to the other can make it reappear in an unpredictable spot. To solve this problem, right click the Desktop and Select Properties/Personalize. In XP, click the Settings tab under Display Properties. In Vista click Display Settings. Windows 7 users should click Display, then Change Display settings, When you see the two screens, simply click and drag the second one up or down until it’s correctly aligned.
10. Select The Web Using Windows Explorer (Win 7)
In Windows 7 that lets you search the web directly from within Windows Explorer. To use this tool you will need to install a search connector for your choice of provider. You will find a decent collection of these along with the full instructions at http://bit.ly/c9otPE
11. Calibrate Screen Colors (Win 7)
Windows 7 has a useful wizard that ensures colors display correctly on your monitor. Go to Start, Control Panel, “Appearance and Personalization”. Click Display, than click the Calibrate Color link in the sidebar. Step through the wizard and adjust the gamma, brightness, contrast and color balance.
12. Hide Desktop Icons (Win XP, Vista, 7)
If you desktop is awash with files, shortcuts and program icons, you can easily make them disappear. Right-click a blank area of your Desktop and go to “View”, Untick the option “Show Desktop Icon” to clear your screen. To restore the icons again, simply repeat the process.
13. Select Multiple Items In Windows Explorer (Win Vista, 7)
Although you can easily select more than one items in Windows Explorer by holding down Shift or Ctrl as you click, there’s an even easier method available. Open Explorer and go to Tools, Folder Options. If the Tools menu is not visible, hold down Alt to display it. Click the View tab and scroll down to “Use check boxes to select items”. Activate this option to make a tick box appear next to an item when you hover your mouse over it. use this to select the item.
“Performance”
14. Speed Up Menus (Win XP, Vista, 7)
you can speed up the opening of menus by clicking start, Run and type “regedit”, click Edit than Find and type “MenuShowDisplay” on the right and choose Modify. Reduce the number to around 100 and click OK.
15. Discover Performance Bottlenecks (Win 7)
The windows resource monitor is a Windows 7 only feature that provides an overview of system performance, along with detailed real-time information about processor, memory disk and network usage. To open the monitor. Click Start and type “resmon” into the box. You can use this tool to start , stop, suspend and resume processes and services, and to troubleshoot misbehaving programs.
16. Prioritise Important Applications (Win XP, Vista, 7)
You can tell Windows to devote more processing power to your favourite applications so they get priority over other tasks. Run a program, than launch the Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Click the Application tab , than right-click the program name. Select Go To Process. Right-click the Process and choose an option from the Set Priority menu.
17. Turn OFF The Gadget Sidebar (Win Vista)
if you don’t use the gadgets feature in Vista, you can turn it off to free up resources. Click Start and go to the Control Panel, select Appearance and Personalization, Windows Sidebar Properties. Untick the option “Start Sidebar when Windows Starts”.
18. Remove Unwanted Scheduled Tasks (Win XP, Vista, 7)
To stop non-essential program looking for updates, go to Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Task Scheduler. Right-click an item to delete it or to change its update frequency.
19. Manage Windows Prefetch (Win XP, Vista, 7)
Prefetch and SuperFetch are Windows features that do exactly what their names suggest – fetch information and applications you are likely to need before you ask for them and load them into memory, thereby speeding things up. You don’t need to worry about the process itself, but if you would like greater control over it. TweakPrefetch is a useful tool that lets you manage the parameters to suit your needs.
20. Use The Windows Mobility Center (Win Vista, 7)
Laptops and Netbooks need to access certain Windows feature more than their desktop counterparts – power management, display brightness wireless networking and the Sync Center. Click start and type Windows Mobility Center to launch the app. The settings on offer depend on your laptop or netbook configuration.
21. Open A Folder In A New System Process (Win 7)
When you open more than one folder in Windows Explorer. Windows 7 will make use of the existing system process. Although this saves on resources, it means that if one folder crashes, the rest are likely to also crash. You can open a folder in a new process by going to Computer, holding down shift, right clicking the folder you want and selecting “Open in new process”.
“Security”
22. Diasble/Enable Password Prompts (Win Vista, 7)
If you have to reboot your system regularly, typing a password every time will soon become annoying. You can solve this problem by pressing the Windows Key and R to open the Run box. Type in: ‘control userpasswords2″ and untick the option ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’. To restore the password protection, repeat the process and tick the box.
23. Lock Your Desktop (Win XP, Vista, 7)
if you are using your PC in a shared environment and want to make sure that no one else can access it from you are away from your desk, a simple shortcut can Lock your system. Press the Windows key and L same time. This will bring up the account login screen. obviously, your account need to be password protected for this to have any effect.
24. Use the Windows 2000 log-on screen (Win XP)
The welcome screen greets you when you fire up XP is attractive, but it also makes life easy for anyone wanting to access your account by providing them your username. To add an extra layer of security, you can remove this piece of information by switching to more secure Windows 2000 log-on screen. Go to Start, control panel, user account, and click ‘Change the way users log on or off’. Now untick the ‘Use the welcome screen’ option.
25. Disable user account control (Win Vista)
The user account control feature can quickly become tiresome in Windows Vista. If you would rather handle security setting yourself, you can easily turn it off. Click Start and select Control Panel. Double-click the user account icon, then click the link that says “Turn User Account Control on or off”. Now untick ‘Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer’ and reboot your system.
“Troubleshooting”
26. Recover individual files using system restore (Win 7 )
System restore can also restore previous version of an individual file of folder – provided the service is running at least One Restore Point. Right-click the folder that the file was in and select ‘Restore previous version’. Pick the version of file or folder you want from the menu and click Restore.
27. Solve Issue With Aero
Aero Improves the look of Windows immeasurably but it can be temperamental and any problems it’s having will become instantly apparent. There’s a built-in troubleshooter available that can identify and fix any issues. To use it, Click Start, type Aero into the search box and click ‘Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects’. Click Next and the Aero troubleshooting Wizard will run and try to get things working again.
28. Find And Fix Disk Errors
The Windows error-checking tools (chkdsk) can identify and fix potential problems with your hard disk, including serious errors such as bad sectors. If your computer crashes or locks forcing a hard reset, you should run it immediately afterwards. Open Computer, right-click the system drive and select Properties. Go to the tools tab and click the check now button. Tick the options to ‘Automatically fix file system errors’ and ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’. You will need to schedule a check and restart your PC.
29. Prevent Automatic Restart (Win Vista, 7)
Once Windows has downloaded and installed important updates, it pesters you to restart your system. Even if you postpone this, it will keep nagging you and will restart regardless if you don’t stop it in time. To kill off the reminder, you just need to temporarily stop the Windows update service. Open a command window by going to start and typing ‘cmd’ into the box. Right-click the program entry and select ‘Run as administrator’. type ‘net stop “windows updates” into the box and hit Enter.
30. Use Microsoft Troubleshooters (Win XP, Vista, 7)
The automated troubleshooters built into Windows 7 might be not able to fix every problem, but they are certainly a step in the right direction. Microsoft new Fix it Center (http://fixitcenter.support.microsoft.com/Portal) provides a quick access to these and automatically downloads others that are relevant to your setup. Best of all, it works with older version windows too.
31. View All Installed Device Drivers (Win Vista, 7)
if you need to do any seriously troubleshooting, it is handy to have a detailed inventory of all the drivers installed on your system and their dates. Windows can produce this for you. Open a command window in administrator mode and type ‘driverquery’. The full list will scroll down. It is not much use like that but adding some switches can help. Type in driverquery /v /fo csv> drvlist.csv’ to save a detailed listing in .csv format to your System32 folder which you can open in excel.
32. Save Popular Help Topic As Shortcut (Win XP)
XP Windows Help and Support Center offers solutions to a wide range of common problems. To run it, go to Start, Help and Support. Because the Center is powered by Internet Explorer. It is possible to save topics as shortcuts that you can view without having to load the center itself. Find the topic you want to save, Right-click on a blank area and select properties, select the Address (URL) and press Ctrl+C to copy it. Right-click the Desktop, and select New, Shortcut. In the create shortcut box type ‘%systemroot%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\HelpCtr.exe /url’ then press Ctrl+V to paste in the copied address. Click Next and name your new shortcut.
“Shortcuts”
33. Hide Some of Your Recently Used Files (Win XP, Vista, 7)
FileTypesMan stop certain file formats showing up in the recent documents folder of the start menu, which displays a list of the files and documents that you most recently used. Browse for the file extension you want to exclude, double-click it and tick ‘Dont add this file type to recent documents’. the program was not clear any of the existing remembered items.
34. Pin Individual Folder To The Taskbar (Win 7)
If you try to pin the folders to the taskbar, they just get added to explore. To get around this, right-click the folder you want and create shortcut. Right-click it and select properties. Change the target to C:\Windows\explorer.exe C:\Foldername. Replace ‘foldername’ with the actual location of the folder. You can change the icon if you wish. Save the changes, then right-click the shortcut and select “Pin to Taskbar”.
35. Create A New Email Message Shortcut (Win XP, Vista, 7)
Save time when writing e-mail by creating a shortcut to the new message window. Right-click the desktop and select new, shortcut. In the location box, enter ‘mailto:’ and call the shortcut something like New Mail. When you double-click the icon, it will open a compose window in your default mail client.
36. Pin The Recycle Bin To The Taskbar (Win 7)
If you drag the recycle bin icon to the Taskbar. It will appear pinned under Windows Explorer. If you’d prefer to have it as a separate icon, right-click the taskbar and select toolbars, New toolbars. Enter %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer’Quick Launch’ the folder directory. right-click the taskbar and untick ‘Lock the taskbar’. Move the new quick launch bar to where you want it delete any required icons. Right-click it and untick Show text and Show Title. Go to View and select large as the icon size. Drag the recycle bin to the new bar and lock the Taskbar afterwards.
37. Add The Recycle Bin To The Computer (Win XP,Vista,7)
You get an a shortcut to the recycle bin in computer using a simple registry hack. Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace. right click in the pane on the right and select New,Key and name it {645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}. When you go into computer, you should now see the recycle bin.
38. Disable Balloon Tips (Win XP, Vista, 7)
The little notification that pop up from the system tray area often get in the way in opportunity moments. XP and Vista users can turn off the balloons with a quick tweak to the registry. Launch regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced and create a new DWORD value called EnableBalloonTips. Give it a value of 0 and click OK. Windows 7 users have it easier. Go to start, control panel, system and security and select the option to review your computer status. The change action Center settings on the left and untick anything you won’t want to be notified about.
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