Windows 7 tutorijali (EN)

Customize the Windows 7 Taskbar with 7 Taskbar Tweaker

The new Taskbar in Windows 7 has a lot of cool features, but might not be everything you want it to be. Today we take a look at a free utility that allows you to tweak the Windows 7 Taskbar and change its default behavior.


7 Taskbar Tweaker

This small lightweight utility doesn’t require installation and does exactly what its name says. After launching the app you can go through and apply the various tweaks it has to offer.







Set Right-click to Standard window menu and instead of getting a Jumplist when right-clicking an icon, you’ll have the standard menu.









Change Dropping to Open With …which allows you to drag a file to an application and open it instead of getting the default Pin to option.








You can also Disable Thumbnail Preview when hovering over an application icon on the Taskbar.










Click on Settings to change the behavior of 7 Taskbar Tweaker to run at startup, hide main window. or hid tray icon.





Other Tweaks

• Disable grouping by application id
• Set middle-click of the mouse to close a window or focus instead of opening a new instance
• Set left-click of the mouse to cycle through windows instead of opening a thumbnail preview

If you’re looking for a way to tweak the default Taskbar behavior in Windows 7, you might want to give this free utility a try. It’s available for 32 & 64 bit versions of Windows 7.




Download 7 Taskbar Tweaker

Delete Flash Cookies to Stop Web Sites from Secretly Tracking You

If you like to keep your browsing private, you probably already clear your history and cookies after a session, but your tracks are not completely gone. There’s also another type of cookie to get rid of called Flash Cookies or Local Shared Objects (LSOs). Today we take a look at how to get rid of these pesky files and improve your privacy.
What are They?
Flash Cookies or LSOs are cookie type files used by Adobe Flash Player and they save your settings and preferences when watching video on a website for better playback. They can also store unique identifiers that keep track of the sites you’re visiting. Some of them will also use the collected data to recreate regular tracking cookies even after you’ve deleted them.
Manual Settings
Note: Changing Flash Settings on the Adobe page is kind of weird, so make sure to check things carefully.
One option is to not allow the LSOs on your machine in the first place. To do this, you need to go to the Global Storage Settings panel on the Adobe site (Link Below) and make the appropriate changes. The Settings Manager on the Adobe site is not a screen shot, but is the actual panel for making changes to how Flash will behave in your browser. If you move the slider all the way to None, then when a Flash app wants to use storage space (insert a Flash Cookie) you’ll need to give it permission.







In this example I set the local storage to None, and now when I go to MySpace and try to play a song, it asks for permission to store the data.






You can also turn them completely off by moving the slider all the way down to none and check the box Never Ask Again. If you this and uncheck the box next to Allow third-party content to store data on your computer, it will keep advertiser flash cookies off your machine, but also makes many flash apps not work.





To delete existing Flash Cookies, click on the Website Storage Settings tab (located all the way to the right of the screen) and click on the Delete all sites button.





You can right-click on a Flash app on a particular page and change the settings as well. Just remember it will only apply to that app on that page, and won’t change the setting globally.







While this method works, it can be tedious and annoying, let’s take a look at some other solutions.
Delete LSOs in Firefox
For users of Firefox, there is a quality Add-on called “BetterPrivacy” which allows you to delete flash cookies after each browsing session.





After installing BetterPrivacy for the first time, go into Options and you’ll be surprised to see how many LSOs are listed.





You can go in and manage different settings like deleting LSOs on exit, application start, by timer, create a shortcut key to delete LSOs and more.



One neat option you might want to select is to add LSO item to the Firefox “Clear History” dialog which isn’t there without the Add-on.







Using CCleaner
If you use IE or any other browser, then another great option for removing LSOs is with CCleaner. By default the Flash Cookies are set to be removed, but you might want to double check to make sure. In the Cleaner section click on the Applications tab, the scroll down to Multimedia and make sure Adobe Flash Player is checked.



When you run an analysis, you will see the results, double click on Multimedia – Adobe Flash Player to see the what it found.






Depending on how much browsing you’ve done and the last time you deleted the LSOs you might be surprised how many are found. Just click Run Cleaner to get rid of them.





When you download CCleaner make sure you’re getting the “Slim” version which does NOT include an attempt to add a worthless toolbar to your machine. We have provided a direct link to the CCleaner Slim below. Another option would be to download it from ninite.com which denies installation of extra Crapware automatically.






Rather than run CCleaner manually, you might want to check out these two articles from The Geek on running it silently via a Hotkey and automatically each night on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

• Setup CCleaner to Automatically Run Each Night in Windows 7, Vista, and XP
• Create a Shortcut or Hotkey to Run CCleaner Silently

Conclusion

For this tutorial we showed Flash Cookies on a Windows system, but they also will show up on your Mac or Linux computer as well. You will need LSOs on your computer for certain Flash Apps to work at the time you’re at the site. However, you don’t need them on your system after you’re done playing a game or listening to music. Flash Cookies are used by websites to track your browsing habits and some recreate regular cookies even after you’ve deleted them. You’ll definitely want to get rid of Flash Cookies (LSOs) if you’re concerned about online privacy. With these tips, and your regular history deletion, it will help you gain better privacy online.

Links

Adobe Flash Player Global Settings Panel


BetterPrivacy Firefox Addon


CCleaner Slim No Toolbar


Flush for OS X

Device Doctor is a Completely Free Driver Update Scanner

Installing the latest device drivers is an essential task for keeping your system running at peak performance, but almost all of the driver update solutions out there aren’t actually free. Thankfully, Device Doctor is absolutely, completely free to use.
Device Doctor comes in two flavors—the regular installable version, and a portable executable that you can throw on a flash drive and use anywhere. Let’s dive right in…
Using Device Doctor
This is one piece of software that couldn’t be simpler—there’s just one screen, and after clicking the Begin Scan button you should see a list of drivers that need updating. You can then click the Download update on each one to actually grab that driver.





On the download page, you’re prompted to download the driver installer and install it manually. It’s not as slick and automated as solutions from other vendors (like Driver Scanner from Uniblue, a sponsor of How-To Geek), but that’s actually one of the things we like about Device Doctor—it puts you in control of your drivers. Did we mention free?





Because there are just so many devices and drivers out there for PCs, you might find that Device Doctor points you to the wrong driver, or an outdated version—and if that happens you should make sure to report an incorrect driver with the link on the driver download page:





Since Device Doctor is still a very young software, feedback from users is very helpful, and over time the kinks will be worked out.
STOP! Before You Install Drivers!
You should always take a time-out before you install a new driver and create a System Restore point, which will enable you to quickly roll back in the case of a failure. We simply cannot state this more strongly! Here’s some walk-through articles explaining how to do so:

• Create a Restore Point for Windows 7 or Vista’s System Restore
• Using System Restore in XP

Now that you’ve done that, we can proceed.
Actually Installing the Drivers
For the actual driver installation, in some cases Device Doctor sent us to a nice, easily installable executable—just run through the wizard and you’re done…





In other cases, however, the driver was a zip file that needs to be installed manually.





We’ve already covered how to install or update a driver in Part 4 of our series about how to build a new computer, but it’s a topic we should probably cover in greater depth down the line.
To install new drivers manually, just right-click the device in Device Manager, choose “Update Driver Software” from the menu, and then pick the “Browse my computer for driver software” on the first wizard page.





The rest is pretty self-explanatory—browse to the folder you extracted the drivers, and run through the rest of the wizard.
So, How Well Does It Work?
In our testing, Device Doctor worked really well for our Windows XP test system—it found 9 drivers that needed updating, and we verified that they were indeed the correct drivers. The actual scan takes only a couple of seconds, and since you don’t even need to install the portable version, it’s not going to clutter up your system with extra nonsense.
For our Windows 7 x64 test systems, it didn’t fare quite as well, with a couple of drivers that were not correct, like this PS/2 keyboard driver, which is obviously for XP:





Since this software is still essentially in “beta”, we can forgive a few mistakes here or there, but we hope the driver checking process becomes a lot more accurate in future versions. Drivers are an essential part of Windows, and you don’t want to go with the wrong ones.
The Device Doctor people assure me that they are adding thousands of new Windows 7 drivers each week, so the problem should work itself out.
What Drivers Should I Update?
This brings up a good point—you don’t need to worry about updating every single driver on your system all the time, like that PS/2 keyboard driver we just mentioned. Here’s the drivers that we do recommend keeping updated:

• Network Card Drivers – Especially as time goes on, wireless network card drivers need to be updated for better support and reliability.
• Video Card Drivers – Every gamer knows that having updated video card drivers can be the difference between 100 and 500 nerd points. Also, better drivers make your system faster.
• Chipset Drivers – You’ll be surprised how much difference the proper SATA drivers make on system performance, or the latest motherboard drivers make when dealing with system sleep issues. Personally I grab these from the manufacturer site.
• Sound Cards – Keep them updated!

How to Check the Version of Your Installed Drivers
Updating your system drivers is all fine and good, but how do you know what version of the driver you already have installed? If you don’t want to install any more software, you can open up Device Manager, find the device in the list, and choose Properties from the right-click menu.
We’ve already explained how you can view the installed list of drivers the easy way, but it’s good to know the manual method as well.




You’ll note that on the context menu you can choose to “Update Driver Software”, which will pull down the latest Microsoft-certified drivers from Windows Update. Unfortunately, Windows Update is often way behind when it comes to driver updates, and doesn’t always carry the manufacturer drivers that sometimes add extra functionality.





On the Driver tab you’ll see the driver maker, date, and version. What you should keep in mind is that Microsoft makes their own drivers for some popular devices, but you can switch to the manufacturer driver instead, which usually is updated more frequently. This means that the current driver version won’t always have the same version numbering sequence as the manufacturer driver.
More About Device Doctor
We spoke to the guys that actually make Device Doctor, and they assured us that Device Doctor is completely free, and will continue to always be completely free. In order to pay the bills (we’re talking about a lot of bandwidth required to run their service), they have advertisements on the driver download page, but they also accept donations.
They welcome your feedback—it’s only with feedback that they can make the software better and provide a great, free service to everybody. You can report incorrect drivers on the download page, or leave suggestions on their forum—the more that everybody reports mistakes, the more accurate the detection will be in the future.




Download Device Doctor from devicedoctor.com

Disable Aero on Windows 7 or Vista

The Windows Aero Glass interface for Windows 7 or Vista requires a decent video card, you won’t be able to use it on an old clunker computer. For those worried about performance, sometimes squeezing every last drop requires disabling Aero.

Disabling Aero on Windows Vista
You might also have some performance reasons for disabling it… to do so, just right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize. Click the “Window Color and Appearance” link:





Then in the next screen, click the link near the bottom for “Open classic appearance properties for more color options”





Now you should be able to disable Aero altogether by choosing Windows Vista Basic in this screen:





Disabling Aero for Windows 7
First, you’ll want to right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize from the menu.




Then you can simply scroll the themes down until you see the Basic themes.

Disable Aero Shake in Windows 7

One of the interesting new features in Windows 7 is the way you can grab a window by the title bar and “shake” it back and forth to minimize everything else. It’s a fun feature, but just in case you want to disable it we’ve got the solution for you.




Disable Aero Shake Manual Registry Hack
Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then navigate down to the following key:

Kod:

Ako želite da vidite sadržaj, molimo vas da se registrujete na SerbianForum.org

Once you are there, right-click on the Windows key and create a new key called Explorer.





Now right-click on the right-hand side, create a new 32-bit DWORD with the following settings:

• Name: NoWindowMinimizingShortcuts
• Value: 1

Once you’ve created this, you should log off and back on for the change to take effect.


Downloadable Registry Hack

Simply download, extract, and double-click on DisableAeroShake.reg to enter the information into the registry. To re-enable use the other file.


Download DisableAeroShake registry hack from howtogeek.com

Disable Aero Snap (the Mouse Drag Window Arranging Feature in Windows 7)

One of the hot new features in Windows 7 is the improved window management functions… you can simply drag a window to the top or sides of the screen, and it will be maximized or resized to take up only half of the screen.
The only problem is that some people like to drag windows partially off the screen, a very useful technique when you only need to see the edge of a window… but in Windows 7 it will resize the window to fill half the screen. So how do we disable it?
Here’s a screenshot of what we’re talking about… for more screenshots see our review of the Windows 7 beta release.





Disabling this feature will also disable dragging to the top of the screen, but you could turn it on or off as needed.
Disabling Mouse Window Drag Arranging
Open up your Control Panel, and then go to the Ease of Access center. From there, click on “Make the mouse easier to use”…






And then remove the checkbox for “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen”, and then click the Apply button to actually save the setting.






I personally like this feature so I probably won’t be turning it off, but it’s nice to know it’s configurable.
Editor’s Note: We’ve been covering Windows 7 quite a bit, but don’t worry, we aren’t going to stop writing about other topics.

Disable and Remove Suggested Sites From Internet Explorer 8

If you’re a user of Internet Explorer 8 either by choice or due to work requirements, you might be tired of seeing the annoying Suggested Sites feature in the Favorites Bar. Today we show you how to disable Suggested Sites and remove it from the Toolbar.
Turn Off Suggested Sites
Suggested Sites is a feature in Internet Explorer 8 (included in Windows 7 by default) and enables you to find sites similar to the one you’re visiting. When Suggested Sites is turned on, your browsing history is sent to Microsoft where they compare it to a list of updated sites that are related.





To turn off the feature click on Tools \ Internet Options.





Click on the Advanced tab then scroll down to Enable Suggested Sites and uncheck the box to turn it off then click Ok.






Now if you click on Suggested Sites you’ll see it’s been disabled and you can enable it again from here if you want.




Remove from Favorites Bar
You might want to turn it off and also get rid of it from your favorites bar. Just right click on Suggested Sites and click on Delete.





Click on Yes to the confirmation dialog screen.





That’s it! The Suggested Sites feature is turned off and it’s also out of your favorites bar.





If you’re concerned about Microsoft tracking your browsing, you might want to turn off the Suggested Sites feature. This is a good solution for getting rid of it being displayed on the Favorite bar as well since you’re not using it.

Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista

The caps lock key is one of those remnants of another age of computers, back when people used to at each other more often. Since it’s not entirely useful anymore we’ll learn how to disable it. If you aren’t interested in the explanation you can skip to the bottom for the registry files.
Windows doesn’t have a default setting to allow for disabling the key, so what we have to do is re-map the key to something non-existent so as to completely disable it.





Here’s the format of the binary data, with the important parts in bold and various colors:

00000000 00000000 02000000 00003A00 00000000

Here’s how it works:

• The first 16 zeros are just there to waste space.
• The “02″ in bold represents how many keys you are going to re-map plus 1. (It really represents the length of the data, but whatever)
• The orange bolded “0000″ is the key we actually want Windows to map TO, which in this case is nothing, or 0.
• The blue bolded “3A00″ is the key we are mapping from, in this case the caps lock key.
• The next 8 zeros are there to waste space as the null terminator.

You can map between multiple keys by incrementing the “02″ and then adding another of the colorful bold blocks in the middle. The 3A00 in the mix is the scan code. For example, if you wanted to disable the caps lock key and then change scroll lock into a caps lock key:

00000000 00000000 03000000 00003A00 3A004600 00000000

Now that you’ve learned how these things work internally, you can download and extract the zipfile which contains the following files:




ChangeCapsToControl.reg Changes Caps Lock to be a Control key ChangeCapsToShift.reg Changes Caps Lock to be a Shift key SwitchCapsToScrollLock.reg Disables Caps Lock and swaps Scroll lock to be Caps Lock KillCapsLock.reg Disables Caps Lock DisableKeyboardRemap Uninstalls the preference by deleting the key


Once you’ve applied one of these registry files, you’ll have to reboot your computer for it to work. To uninstall, you can use the uninstall registry tweak, or you can simply delete the Scancode Map key entirely.




Download Keyboard Mappings Registry Tweaks

Disable Delete Confirmation Dialog in Windows 7 or Vista

Every time you delete a file, Windows asks you “Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?” This is typically a good thing, to prevent you from deleting files by accident, but if you are trying to do some cleanup and need to delete a lot of files, you might not want to be prompted every single time.
There’s a simple way to turn it off, thankfully, although I’d recommend you leave it on the majority of the time.





Just right-click on your Recycle Bin and choose Properties from the menu.





Now you’ll see the Trash Properties dialog, and notice the “Display delete confirmation dialog” at the bottom.





Just uncheck the box, and close the dialog. No more confirmations! (I’d still recommend that you turn it back on when you are done cleaning up your computer)

Disable Error Reporting in XP, Vista, and Windows 7

When you’re trying to fix a computer or are setting it up for certain functionality for a business, it can be quite annoying always getting error messages when you know what your doing. Today we take a look at disabling those messages in XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
Note: Error Reporting can be valuable if Windows isn’t working correctly and shouldn’t be disabled unless you’re a system admin or power user. This is not recommended for the average home user.






Error Reporting is enabled by default on XP, Vista, and Windows 7. If an error occurs, a detailed message regarding the error pops up and you’re prompted to send the information to Microsoft. This is so they can gather error info from millions of PC’s and helps them create patches and Service Packs. In some cases it will check the error and provide solutions to fix it. When you’re setting up a machine for specific functionality, the messages get very annoying. There are a number of reasons why an experienced user or tech would want to turn them off, so lets begin.
Disable Error Reporting in Windows 7
Open up the start menu and type in problem reporting settings into the search box, or head to Action Center –> Change Action Center Settings –> Problem Reporting Settings. If you used the search, use the “Choose how to report problems” item in the list:





Then you can easily choose the option from the list:





Again, you probably should leave it enabled, but this will let you disable it.
Disable Error Reporting in Windows 7 with Group Policy
Note: This method used Local Group Policy Editor which isn’t available in Home versions of Windows 7.
Click on Start and enter gpedit.msc into the search box and hit Enter.





Local Group Policy Editor opens and you want to navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Error Reporting and under Setting double click on Disable Windows Error Reporting.





Change it from Not Configured to Enabled, then click Apply and Ok and close out of Local Group Policy Editor.




Disable Error Reporting in Vista
To disable Error Reporting in Vista click on Start and open Control Panel.





Make sure you’re in Classic View and double click on Problem Reports and Solutions.





Under Tasks click on the Change Settings link.





It’s worth noting here that if you choose Ask me to check if a problem occurs, error reporting is enabled but you get to choose whether or not to send the diagnostics to Microsoft. If you select Check for solutions automatically (recommended) then all data will be sent to Microsoft automatically. Since we want to disable it all together, click on the Advanced Settings link.





In the next screen under For my programs, problem reporting is…select Off then click Ok to close out of the Problem Reports and Solutions window.





Next you’ll see that everything under Choose how to check for solutions to computer problems is grayed out. Click Ok to close out of this screen.





Click Close on the message telling you that Error Reporting is turned off.




Disable Error Reporting in XP
To disable error reporting in XP right click on My computer and select Properties. In the System Properties window click the Advanced tab then the Error Reporting button.





The Error Reporting window comes up where you want to select Disable error reporting. Uncheck the box But notify me when critical error occur if you don’t want to see any errors at all then click Ok and Ok to close out of

the System Properties window.





Conclusion

When you’re setting up a computer for a set of users in a company, chances are the settings will pop up error messages that you already know about, and this takes up time to click out of them. With error reporting turned off, experienced users can go about their business without being annoyed constantly. A couple of other suggestions to eliminate other annoyances is to disable Program Compatibility Assistant and disabling the delete confirmation dialog as well. So far I haven’t noticed as many errors in Windows 7 as Vista, and they seemed to be a regular occurrence on XP. Disabling Error Reporting allows the experienced user to save time by not having to constantly clicking out of them.