Change the Number of Recent Items Shown on the Windows 7 / Vista Start Menu

If you’ve ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you’ve found the right article. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak.
What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu (I changed mine down to 1 for illustration)

Change Start Menu to Use Small Icons in Windows 7 or Vista

Windows Vista uses large icons by default in the start menu, and it hides the setting for small icons pretty well. No matter, we’ve located it. (Thankfully Windows 7 is a bit easier)

Changing in Windows 7
Simply right-click on the start menu orb button, choose Properties, then check the box for Use Small Icons on the Taskbar tab:

Beginner Geek: Customize or Disable Sound Events in Windows 7 or Vista

If you’re looking for a way to customize your system with more than wallpapers and icons, another thing you can do is customize sounds for different Windows 7 events. Here we look at customizing sounds or completely turning them off.

Here we take a look at customizing or disabling sound events in Windows 7, if you’re an Ubuntu user you can check out how to disable Login sounds in Ubuntu.

Change Windows 7 Sounds
Right-click on the speaker icon in your taskbar and select Sounds.

Add keyboard languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7

Do you regularly need to type in multiple languages in Windows?  Here we’ll show you the easy way to add and change input languages to your keyboard in XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
Windows Vista and 7 come preinstalled with support for viewing a wide variety of languages, so adding an input language is fairly simply.  Adding an input language is slightly more difficult in XP, and requires installing additional files if you need an Asian or Complex script language.  First we show how to add an input language in Windows Vista and 7; it’s basically the same in both versions.  Then, we show how to add a language to XP, and also how to add Complex Script support. 

Please note that this is only for adding an input language, which will allow you to type in the language you select.  This does not change your user interface language.

Change keyboard language in Windows 7 and Vista
It is fairly simple to add or change a keyboard language in Windows 7 or Vista.  In Windows 7, enter “keyboard language” in the Start menu search box, and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”.

Add Home Directory Icon to the Desktop in Windows 7 or Vista

One of the new changes in Windows 7 and Vista is that each user has a “Home” directory that is actually accessible and meant to be used. In XP and 2k, you had a hidden home directory that you weren’t meant to muck around in.
Some of the new features, like the Downloads directory, are only accessible through your Home directory, which is why it makes sense to put an icon for it right on the desktop.
To do this, click the Start button, and then right click on your User name. Choose the Show on Desktop option:

Add Dropbox to the Send To Menu in Windows 7, XP, and Vista

Dropbox is one of the coolest utilities available today to backup and share files and folders online. If you want easier access to it, you might want to add it to the Send To Menu in the Context Menu.

Add Dropbox to Send To Menu in Vista & Windows 7
First navigate to the following path by copying the following into the Windows Explorer address bar or the Search box in the Start Menu.

Add "Take Ownership" to Explorer Right-Click Menu in Win 7 or Vista

Taking ownership of system files or folders in Windows 7 or Vista is not a simple task. Whether you use the GUI or the command line, it takes far too many steps.
Thankfully somebody created a registry hack that will give you a menu item for “Take Ownership” that will handle all the steps for you.  (If you are the person that originally made this script, let me know and I’ll give you credit)

Add "Run as Administrator" to Any File Type in Windows 7 or Vista

Have you ever tried to unzip a file to the Program Files directory in Windows 7 or Vista? You’ll get all sorts of permission denied errors, and generally be unsuccessful. So how do we open up the zipfile as an administrator? For that matter, how do you open any file as administrator?
There’s a simple registry tweak that will let us specify the action to run as administrator for a file type. Unfortunately you’ll have to make the tweak manually, but we’ll walk you through it.

Note: The method explained here is courtesy of jd2066, one of the helpful geeks over on our forum.

4) Create Administrator Mode Shortcuts Without UAC Promptsimage Instead of disabling UAC in any way, what we can do is setup a few shortcuts that bypass UAC entirely. This is especially useful if you open a particular administrator-mode application a dozen times per day. The trick to this is using task scheduler to launch the applications, and then telling task scheduler to run the task. This is more secure than the other options, since only our special shortcut will bypass UAC.

As regular readers know well, I’m a huge fan of using AutoHotkey  to automate my entire computing experience… but in Windows 7 and Vista there’s a serious limitation since you can’t run a script as Administrator by default. This means that your hotkeys can’t interact with windows running in Admin mode… so how do we get around this?
There are three solutions to this problem:

• Completely Disable UAC – Not the best solution for security purposes, but it works.
• Compile your script to an executable.
• Hack the registry and add “Run as Administrator” to the context menu.

4 Ways to Make UAC Less Annoying on Windows 7 / Vista

The single biggest irritation in Windows 7 and Vista is the UAC (User Account Control) system, especially for people that do a lot of tweaking. When you are trying to make configuration changes, it seems like every couple of seconds you are hitting another UAC prompt. Sure, it’s more secure… but what options do we have to make it less annoying?
There are at least 4 different ways that we can tweak UAC to be less annoying, most of which I’ve written about before.

Note: Disabling or modifying UAC is a security risk. If you want to be as secure as possible, you should likely leave things alone.


1) Disable UAC Entirely
The first thing that you can always do is completely disable UAC… the only problem with this is that you’ll end up making the system less secure if you are also the type of person that downloads and tests a lot of software. I can’t recommend that you do this, but at least you know that you have the option to.

2) Auto-Accept UAC Prompts for Administrators Only
If you want to leave UAC enabled, but disable the prompts from showing up under your administrator account, you  can tweak a setting that will “Elevate without prompting”, so you never see the prompt show up. This is more secure than disabling UAC entirely, because an application started as a regular user can’t perform an action that is meant for administrators. For instance, Internet Explorer can still run in protected mode this way.

3) Disable the Blackout Screen (Secure Desktop)
The most annoying part of UAC for me is the screen that blacks out everything other than the UAC prompt… because it usually takes forever to show up, and depending on your video card it can do weird things with your desktop. You can disable the secure desktop feature but leave the UAC prompts the way they are… of course this is potentially a security hole as well, since an application could fraudulently “click” the prompt for you. (Secure desktop prevents applications from doing this)

4) Create Administrator Mode Shortcuts Without UAC Prompts
Instead of disabling UAC in any way, what we can do is setup a few shortcuts that bypass UAC entirely. This is especially useful if you open a particular administrator-mode application a dozen times per day. The trick to this is using task scheduler to launch the applications, and then telling task scheduler to run the task. This is more secure than the other options, since only our special shortcut will bypass UAC.