The "Best Windows Tip You Know" Thread

[bobdude]

i'm pretty sure everyone knows about this one but it's a combination that i use a lot. when you're in IE or Firefox and you want to go to a site, google for example, you can just type google in the address bar and then hit ctrl+enter and it automatically completes the whole address and takes you to the site.

wow didnt know it thanks and thanks for the volume ctrl+s tip also

Best I know are windows key + pause break takes you to settings

Does anyone knon if this is possible in XP?

In 98 you had a desktop button on the bottom bar that would minimize all open windows and take you to the desktop.

Did they save that in XP?

I love this option in 98. It's like a desktop icon, u know what I mean

thx :punk:

yes they do i just discovered that

[Lare2]

oh this is one tip i find quite neat (sorry if its been mentioned)

hold shift and select thumbnail view, it removes the text under individual files in thumbnail view. do the same to return to toggle on/off

I really liked that one, thanks (Y). Nice thread /me rates it with a 5 :pc:

[imtoomuch]

When overwriting many files, for example, Windows has a "Yes to all" option, but there is no "No to all" option shown. You can tell Windows "No to all" by holding Shift and clicking on "No". Very handy IMO.

There are a lot of great tips on this thread. Let's keep it going. :D

[chrism583]

This thread is amazing, thanks y'all.

My contribution: When you run the command prompt it usually starts out at C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\ or someplace like that. To change the starting path(my example starts at C:\) run regedit and navigate to: My Computer\HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor, right-click on AutoRun, Modify, and enter CD\ as your value data.

[em_te]

This thread is so much better than the "THE TIPS & TRICKS thread post only tips no questions" thread that is currently pinned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They should delete that thread and make this the new sticky!!!! :yes: :yes: :yes: We should collect all of these tips and submit them to O'Reilly to be published as a book!!!

Now my tip!!!:

If you right click on the recycle bin icon, you can choose "Emply recycle bin" to empty the recycle bin! There is no need to double-click it to open it first!! :bounce:

[saturnslullaby]

Ever have to press the Num Lock key prior to logging in to windows? don't you hate that? Even though you turn on the Num Lock in whatever respected BIOS you're using - as soon as you get to the windows Login screen you have to press Num Lock... well... my tip is this:

when you're already on the login screen ready to enter in the password, press Num Lock to turn it on, and then restart the computer using the Shutdown option in either the XP Welcome screen, or the CTRL+ALT+DEL screen in Windows 2000/XP/Server.

From now on the Num Lock will be on ready to go... UNTIL you format, then you have to do it again.

[Ambience]

In Firefox:

Hold down shift then use the scroll wheel on your mouse. This is a shortcut for moving back and forward between pages.

[Herby]

In Firefox:

Hold down shift then use the scroll wheel on your mouse. This is a shortcut for moving back and forward between pages.

Does also work in Internet Explorer. :p ?;))

[Herby]

Here's another one:

If you have Outlook installed you can create a shortcut that creates Sticky Notes:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office10\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office XP)

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office11\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office 2003)

? ?

You can change the appearance of the notes in OutlookTools -> Options -> Preferences Tabb>

[opsL]

Here's another one:

If you have Outlook installed you can create a shortcut that creates Sticky Notes:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office10\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office XP)

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office11\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office 2003)

You can change the appearance of the notes in Outlook: Tools -> Options -> Preferences Tab

Oh cool, I'm going to try that right now. Thanks for that :D.

[nav1]

When overwriting many files, for example, Windows has a "Yes to all" option, but there is no "No to all" option shown. You can tell Windows "No to all" by holding Shift and clicking on "No". Very handy IMO.

Thanks man! I have always wanted to have that option. :woot:

[aristofeles]

Disable Windows builtin zip search support (this can really speed up the search on some directories, especially if like me you keep all your installers as a backup)

Run the command: regsvr32 c:\windows\\system32\zipfldr.dll /u

Now go to the zipfldr.dll on system32 and rename it to somethink like zipfldrOLD.dll

Last, open winzip/winrar/whatever, and associete it with zip files again (it lost that association after the Run command)

(to undo: fix the dll name, and run regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll)

[Raditz]

sorry if posted... but some people just don't know this:

Shift+No in any dialog box is interpreted as No to All

and Ctrl+H can hide opera's window and makes it remain in the tray.

Rad

[NienorGT]

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office10\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office XP)

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office11\Outlook.exe" /c ipm.stickynote (Office 2003)

Thx

Replace "11" per "12" in Office12 Beta it work also

[Martyn]

In Firefox:

Hold down shift then use the scroll wheel on your mouse. This is a shortcut for moving back and forward between pages.

You can also hold down CTRL and use the scroll wheel to make the text on the page bigger or smaller. Really helps if your eyes are not the best in the world :).

[Mohsin Naqi]

Well many of you may already know it but I'll share it anyway :happy:

If you use quick launch often and wish that there were a few more of them then the good news is that you can make as many custom 'quick launch'es as you want, just make a folder on you hard drive and put the shortcuts of your favorite programs/files in it, done ? now right click your taskbar and choose Toolbars > new toolbar, browse for the folder you just created and voila !!! you have your custom launch bar.

Tip 1: if you create any sub folders inside the main folder, they'll appear as submenus.

Tip2: You can even select "My Computer" as your toolbar for quick access to any file on you hard disk.

That's it.

[JVAGO]

I found some new tips in here that were definetly useful. Very.

Also, love the tip above. I already knew it, but I remember when I first found it. I always hated THE quicklaunch because I didn't want to both with the 100s of shortcuts already in it. So making a new one was always a great option. Different ones to. A folder for my Samurize stuff, My Pictures, etc.

Tip:

Alt+0160 = The infamous ASCII spacebar~ Great for blank desktop shortcuts.

Have another clock made with something like Samurize, Konfabulator, etc. and don't want two clocks? Easy. Right click your taskbar and hits properties. A checkbox to remove it! Surprisingly, not many people know this...

Right clicking on your taskbar has an option to bring up task manager? Weird. Usually you bring it up to fix the taskbar from being frozen, but in cases where its otherwise and you hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and are afraid of hitting it again when it didn't show up, right click and acess it there. Most might be afraid in the case they might reset when doing something precious and no way to get back to it!

Editing your registry.. but only one key? Not to partial to backing the WHOLE thing up? Well, you should, but if you don't want to, just export the key you're editing. File > Export then if you ever did export you'd notice the selected branch option. Yep. If you're at the branch you're editing, export, and it should be on selected and have the branch you're editing in the box ready for export. Just give it a good name for heavens sake.

Want a good default windows icon for a misc. file? Right click, properties, change icon. If its blank, his browse and type Shell32.dll for a good selection of Windows icons. I find all kinds of neat stuff. Heck, theres lots of dlls in there. You can also harvest Icons from programs by selecting them. Knock yourself out. Some programs have hidden unused icons!

--Jeshua

[Geranium_Z__NL]

hey thnx for all the tricks :p Testing (and doing) them all now :D

[Prosidius]

Alt-Tab to switch between open apps. You probobly already knew this though. :p

[phunny_pharmer]

hahah no doubt tihs is a really great thread. thanks

[darkmark327]

Here's one, not sure if it's in the thread already: hold shift when you click a menu item to prevent the menu from closing. For example, the start menu.

Here's another one. If you put the explorer bars on the taskbar (see screenshot if you don't know what I mean), you can control-click any folders/drives to get a context menu:

Alt-Tab to switch between open apps. You probobly already knew this though. :p

Hold shift while doing it to go backwards.

Another one: in a tabbed dialog box (e.g. Display settings), hit ctrl-tab / crtl-shift-tab to switch tabs.

Another one: got a window that's opened offscreen and you can't click the titlebar to move it back? Type Alt+space then m then use the arrow keys. Once you've pressed an arrow key you can move the mouse and click when you're done.

Edited March 25, 2006 by darkmark327

[Keito]

win-key + R;

"." will get you to C:\Documents and Settings\Your Account

".." wil get you to C:\Documents and Settings

"..." will get you to My Computer.

(without the quotes.)

[mousepadtech]

%windir%\System32\control.exe userpasswords2

shows a more useful user accounts setup dialog

---------------------------------------------------------

to save your tcp/ip settings:

netsh interface dump > settings.txt

to restore em:

netsh exec settings.txt

to reset em:

netsh int ip reset [log_file_name]

there is an easier way to do this

go to RUN

type control userpasswords2

gets you to the same place

[darkmark327]

Another one: the indexing service isn't useless, just stupid. If you enable it you may have noticed that your searches aren't really faster. That's because, by default, it doens't use the index to search unless the entire drive is fully indexed (which never happens because it doesn't do work when your computer is in use, and if your computer's in use then files have changed which need to be re-indexed). So what you do is this:

- To search by filename, put "@filename [filename]" in the "Containing text" box. To search for text within the file, put "![text]" in the box.

There are tons of other cool things you can do, e.g.

"@write > -1d12h" to see all files modified in the last 1.5 days.

"@DocAuthor = Mark" for all documents whose Author is "Mark".

"@DocPageCount > 6 AND @DocPageCount < 10"

"#swim**" - Different forms of the word swim, such as swam and swum

Also--you need to prefix with # if you want to use *, because it also uses regular expressions (and you use # to use a regular expression).

e.g. "#Filename = mark*". In this case you omit the @ before the property name.

I encourage you to look through the indexing service help (I'll tell you where in a minute) at the example queries.

To configure the indexing service, start->run ciadv.msc; you can get to the help from there too. You can set it such that it has basically no performance hit.

Your best bet (after you've opened ciadv.msc) is to go to action->properties, enable "index files with unknown extensions" and action->all tasks->performance, customize, lazy and lazy. You can also install "IFilters" to index other extensions. http://www.citeknet.com/ has a lot. This will let you index things like .rar files, .zip files, and there are ifilters for other things. Be careful though, as some are buggy and will crash the indexing service. Adobe has one for .pdfs as well.

See, MS had indexing desktop search since Windows 2000, well before google desktop and the msn desktop search (which uses the indexing service btw), they were just dumb and it didn't work quite right. Vista improves it a lot.

Edited March 25, 2006 by darkmark327

[ozgeek]

Nice tricks guys :D

Got another one:

Want a very clean folder of thumbnails of your holiday photos?

Hold SHIFT (any one will do) while you open a folder with thumbnails in it such as pictures or videos. This will cause the window to open thumbnails only and not filenames. Do it again to get the filenames to show up :)