Windows Vista (EN)

Place Internet Explorer 7 & 8 Menu Bar Back On Top

Do you wish the IE7 Menu bar was located where it was in IE6? Here is how to quickly create a registry fix to move it back to the top.
After you install IE7 you have to make the menu bar appear. Right click an empty spot on the tool bar and place a checkmark next to Menu Bar. It will also show up temporarily if you hold down the Alt key.





You will see that IE 7 puts the Menu Bar underneath the Address Bar which we don’t want.
Open up notepad by clicking Start \ Run, type in notepad and click OK.





Copy and paste the following script into notepad. You do not need to modify the code at all. Just copy and paste it into notepad.

Kod:

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Here is how we turn it into a reg key fix. Click on File \ Save As, but don’t click on Save until you read the next step.





Change your notepad Save as type to “All Files” and name the file something like IE7_Toolbar_fix.reg. Naming the file with the .reg extension is the key for this to work. Now you can click on Save.






You have just created a registry fix! Now double click the file you just created.
You will get the following confirmation screen. Click Yes.





The next screen will be confirming the registry key was added.





Close out of Internet Explorer if it is open and relaunch it. The Menu Bar is now on top!





Uninstall
To change the Menu bar back to the original position, use this registry script instead:

Kod:

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Play Real Media Audio Using VLC

Last week we showed you how to download and convert Real Media Audio streams using RealPlayer itself. While useful, there was an inherent flaw in the logic of this post: Most users would prefer never to sit at a computer with RealPlayer installed let alone willingly subject themselves to the all-too-familiar sight below.






But for those of us with no interest in touching RealPlayer with a digital ten foot pole, there is a reasonably straightforward way to play the streams without having to sell your soul, and what’s more it uses the geekiest media player around; VLC.
If you aren’t aware of VLC, it pretty much plays everything. To download VLC follow this link.




Once you’ve installed the the program, open it up and click Media, then Streaming.






Change the filter drop down menu to All Files.





Then select your stream and click Play.

Then here simply click the Play Locally box.




Then stream.




And your stream should begin playing. This works for RM/RAM audio, but not for all video due to the issues associated with RealPlayer’s closed source codec. But while there’s no consistently easy escape from RealPlayer for our eyes, at least our ears can enjoy uninterrupted sound without ever having to click on that silly little speech bubble icon again.

Play Your Favorite DOS Games in XP, Vista, and Windows 7

Want to take a trip down memory lane with old school DOS games? D-Fend Reloaded makes it easy for you to play your favorite DOS games directly on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
D-Fend Reloaded is a great frontend for DOSBox, the popular DOS emulator. It lets you install and run many DOS games and applications directly from its interface without ever touching a DOS prompt. It works great on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 32 & 64-bit versions.
Getting Started
Download D-Fend Reloaded (link below), and install with the default settings. You don’t need to install DOSBox, as D-Fend Reloaded will automatically install all the components you need to run DOS games on Windows.





D-Fend Reloaded can also be installed as a portable application, so you can run it from a flash drive on any Windows computer by selecting User defined installation.





Then select Portable mode installation.





Once D-Fend Reloaded is installed, you can go ahead and open the program. Then simply click “Accept all settings” to apply the default settings.



D-Fend is now ready to run all of your favorite DOS games.




Installing DOS Games and Applications:
To install a DOS game or application, simply drag-and-drop a zip file of the app into D-Fend Reloaded’s window. D-Fend Reloaded will automatically extract the program…





Then will ask you to name the application and choose where to store it — by default it uses the name of the DOS app.





Now you’ll see a new entry for the app you just installed. Simply double-click to run it.





D-Fend will remind you that you can switch out of fullscreen mode by pressing Alt+Enter, and can also close the DOS application by pressing Ctrl+F9. Press Ok to run the program.





Here we’re running Ms. PacPC, a remake of the classic game Ms. Pac-Man, in full-screen mode. All features work automatically, including sound, and you never have to setup anything from DOS command line — it just works.





Here it’s in windowed mode running on Windows 7.





Please note that your color scheme may change to Windows Basic while running DOS applications.





You can run DOS application just as easily. Here’s Word 5.5 running in in DOSBox through D-Fend Reloaded…




Game Packs:
Want to quickly install many old DOS freeware and trial games? D-Fend Reloaded offers several game packs that let you install dozens of DOS games with only four clicks…just download and run the game pack installer of your choice (link below).





Now you’ve got a selection of DOS games to choose from.





Here’s a group of poor lemmings walking around … in Windows 7.




Conclusion
D-Fend Reloaded gives you a great way to run your favorite DOS games and applications directly from XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Give it a try, and relive your DOS days from the comfort of your Windows desktop.
What were some of your favorite DOS games and applications? Leave a comment and let us know.
Links

Download D-Fend Reloaded


Download DOS game packs for D-Fend Reloaded


Download Ms. Pac-PC

Power Up and Manage Your Windows Send To Menu with Send To Toys

One of our readers wrote in a while back asking why we hadn’t featured the Send To Toys utility, a great addition to your Send To menu that lets you pick any folder to send a file to, send the file name to the clipboard, or a number of other useful features. Today we’ll show you how it works.
Many of you might remember the old Send to X Powertoy that was included way back in the Windows 95 days. The Send To Toys utility is a similar add-on that offers the same functionality, plus a lot more.
Installing Send To Toys
The installation process is very simple, and even gives you a quick configuration screen so you can turn on or off some of the features during install.



You can easily configure these items later, so don’t worry about doing it now.
Configuring Send To Toys
The installation process will open up the configuration dialog at the end, but if you want to get to it later, you can find it under Control Panel’s Additional Options section.






If you are running 64-bit Windows, you’ll have to look under the 32-bit section as well…





And you should see Send To Toys in the list.





The first tab on the configuration dialog is extremely helpful… it lets you add or remove folders and items from the Send To menu. Of course without the utility you could do this manually by opening the shell:sendto folder and dragging and dropping, but this is a lot simpler.





The Add button will pop up a dialog letting you quickly choose what to add to the menu.





The Folder tab allows you to configure which folder is the default in the “Folder…” send-to item added by this utility (screenshots below). The two really interesting options here are the “Open destination on completion”, which will open up the folder you just sent the file to… and “Default to move”, which is pretty self-explanatory.





The Clipboard tab shows you some of the great options for the “Send to Clipboard (as name)” item… you can choose whether or not you want quotes, and whether you want files to be separated on different lines, if you send multiple files to the clipboard.





The Default Mail Recipient tab was very promising, but that feature didn’t work for me. The idea is that you can specify a single mail recipient to send a file to…






But whenever I tried to use the feature I got this message… your mileage may vary.





If that feature doesn’t work for you either, you can easily just remove the item from the menu using the Send To configuration tab.
Using Send To Toys
Now that you’ve run through the configuration dialogs, it’s time to right-click a file and look at your Send To menu (mine is kinda messy)





One of the most useful items is the Folder… item, which pops up a dialog allowing you to copy, move, or just create a shortcut to the file.






Here’s where this feature gets really helpful… if you click that little blue Folder link in the bottom left, you’ll get a history drop-down of your recent folder choices.






If you sent the file to the Run… item instead, you’d get the Run dialog with the filename pre-populated… very helpful if you want to run the application with command line arguments easily.





Send to Command Prompt works similarly, but pre-populates a command prompt with the name of the file.





You’ll also notice new items when you right-click on an executable file, allowing you to quickly Add or Remove that application from the Send To menu.





Overall, it’s a very useful utility, well worth checking out if you use the Send To menu a lot. Note that it works fine in any version of Windows.


Download Send To Toys from gabrieleponti.com

Power Up Your Start Menu Search Box in Windows Vista

Vista Start Menu Health Without Start++
Coolness: 0.5
Usefulness: 0.8
Show-Off Factor: 3.9


Vista Start Menu Health With Start++
Coolness: 14.2
Usefulness: 999.9
Show-Off Factor: 24.9


As you can see, significant stat increases just from installing Brandon Paddock’s Start++ Start menu enhancement, mostly in the area of usefulness. What’s this all about, you ask?
Start++ is a small add-on application that lets you create aliases of words and characters to commands or searches. You can set the commands to run with administrator privileges. You can even save commands as “Startlets” and share them with your friends.
Here are some Start++ usage examples:

• Search Google by typing in g <keyword>
• 
  
• Search Dictionary by using d <keyword>
• Search Wikipedia by using w <keyword>
• Search IMDB by using imdb <keyword>
• Search anywhere by making a custom search command:
• 
  
• Use sudo before any command to make it run as administrator:
• 
  
• 
  Finally, a sudo command for Windows Vista!
• Search for music to play and open in Media Player. You could use “Play Nickleback”, for example. I’m looking forward to testing out these commands.
• Start++ even works from the command prompt.
• Create an alias for anything you want. You could set “i” to open Internet explorer, and “f” for Firefox, for instance.

Download Start++ From Brandon Paddock’s site now.

Prevent Explorer from Freezing With Large Zip Files on Vista

This article was written by Daniel Spiewak, a great software developer and friend of the How-To Geek.
Windows Vista has built-in handling for zip files – you can create, extract, or even browse right down into them as if they were a folder. But if you have very big zip files sitting on your hard drive, bad things can happen unless you disable the zip handler.
How We Figured It Out
Just today, I was trying to restore some of my files from a previous backup. I grabbed the enormous zip file off my network drive and saved it onto the desktop. From there, a little bit of WinZip magic grabbed me the one, 25 MB directory I really wanted out of the whole 11 GB zip file. I knew I might want to restore more files later though, so I left the file on my desktop (even transferring over gigabit, 11 GB is still 11 GB).
When I finally got back to my host desktop later that evening, I found to my utter shock that things weren’t working properly. For example, I opened up the file explorer and tried to expand a folder in the tree pane on the left-hand side. Instead of nicely expanding, showing the sub-folders, it just started spinning its wheels. When I came back to it ten minutes later, it was still chugging away.
I killed the explorer.exe process, restarted explorer and went on with my workflow. At least, until WinZip started having issues. I hit the “Extract” button on a reasonable sized archive (150 MB) and the app froze. Just like explorer, it was eating my full cpu and doing absolutely nothing with it.
Recognizing I was out of my league, I fired up a conversation with “The Geek” and we started troubleshooting. An hour and a half later, after pouring through mountains of log files, downloading tools I didn’t even know existed, and wading through pages of output from SysInternals “procmon”, we finally found the problem.
It seems that Windows Vista file explorer (by default) attempts to recurse into any zip archives in a direct subdirectory, allowing users to view the contents of the zip file directly in the sidebar. Windows XP had the same “feature”, but it waited to enter the zip file until you actually expanded the node in the sidebar. In principle, Vista’s method is a good idea. XP always suffered from long delays whenever you expanded a zip file, particularly over a network connection. Grabbing a file list in the background seems like a good idea, until you take into account extremely large archives.
By trying to recurse into that 11 GB zip file sitting on my desktop, Vista pretty much started a processor-intensive task that it had no chance of completing in a reasonable timeframe. Thus, killing performance across the board with no tangible return.
Disabling Zip Handling
The obvious solution to this problem is to just turn off Windows’s built-in zip file handling, since I’m using WinZip anyway. The quickest way to do this is to use the excellent ShellExView application to disable the explorer shell extension. (you don’t have to install it, just in case you’re leery about that sort of thing)
Open up ShellEx in Administrator mode by right-clicking the file and choosing “Run as Administrator”. Select all of the “Compressed” items, right-click and select “Disable Selected Items”.





Now that the extension is taken care of, you can either logout, or you can be a bit smarter about things and just restart the “explorer.exe” process. To do this, open up Task Manager (right-click on the task bar and select “Task Manager”, or use that good ol’ three fingered Vulcan nerve pinch, Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and find the “explorer.exe” process. There probably will be more than one process in the list named “explorer.exe”, so be sure to sort by CPU and select the one farthest toward the top.
Once you’ve selected the explorer, click the “End Process” and confirm in the ensuing dialog. The taskbar will disappear, along with all of your file explorer windows.





Now select “New Task (Run…)” from the File menu. In the “Open:” text box, enter “explorer” and hit OK. After a moment, the taskbar should reappear and everything should be hunky-dory. After this, you shouldn’t have any more problems with large zip files locking up the system.







Download ShellExView from nirsoft.net

Prevent Windows Asking for a Password on Wake Up from Sleep/Standby

If you’ve configured Windows to automatically log you in rather than having to enter a password, you might find it annoying that you still need to enter a password when your PC comes out of sleep mode. Here’s the quick fix.
Make Windows 7 Not Require a Password on Wake
Windows 7 makes the whole thing a lot easier—just head into Power Options in Control Panel, then click the “Require a password on wakeup” on the left-hand side.





Then click the “Change settings that are currently unavailable” link…





Then you can click the “Don’t require a password” radio button, and make sure to Save your changes.



Make Windows Vista Not Require a Password on Wake
Head into the Power Options in Control Panel, find the power plan you’re using, and then click the Change plan settings link (which will look slightly different in Vista)





Then click the “Change advanced power settings” link at the bottom of the screen.





And then the “Change settings that are currently unavailable” link… yeah, at this point it’s starting to get tedious.





And now, you can finally change the “Require a password on wakeup” to No. Make sure to do it for both.





And that’s how we do it.
Changing the Setting for Windows XP
In Windows XP, the process is a little simpler—just head into the Power Options in Control Panel, find the Advanced tab, and then uncheck the box for “Prompt for password when computer resumes from standby”.

Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer

We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. I’ve become convinced that this dialog has been designed to detect when we are most busy and only prompt us at that moment.
The real problem comes into play when Windows gets tired of reminding us and says that the computer is going to reboot in 5 minutes, and the only way you can prevent the inevitable is to temporarily disable Windows Update.
There’s a couple of ways that we can disable this behavior, however. You’ll still get the prompt, but it won’t force you to shut down.





I don’t believe this trick will work for XP Home or Vista Home users, according to the documentation that I’ve read. You’ll have to resort to the temporary disabling measures instead.
Manual Registry Hack
Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box or run dialog, and navigate down to the following key, creating new keys if they don’t exist.

Kod:

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Create a new 32-bit DWORD value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and give it a value of 1 to prevent automatic reboot while users are logged on. Delete the value to put things back to the way they were.
Downloadable Registry Hack
Just download and extract the registry hack files and double-click on WUNoAutoReboot.reg to disable automatic reboots. The other script will remove the hack.


Download WUNoAutoReboot Registry Hack


Using Auto Reboot Remover Utility
If you’d rather not mess with the registry, you can use a small utility created by the guys at Intelliadmin which will make the changes for you. Just make sure you right-click and run as administrator if you are using Vista.





Download Auto Reboot Remover from Intelliadmin


This hack should work for the professional or business editions of XP, Vista, or even Windows Server. I’d be interested to hear your feedback in the comments.

Print Only What You Need in Internet Explorer with Printee

Are you wishing that there was a way to only print the material that you need in a webpage without all the other junk? Now you can do so quickly and easily with Printee for IE.
Installation & Setup
Installation is quick and simple with only four install windows to go through. After you have finished installing Printee for IE, you will need to add the toolbar button to the toolbar.
Right Click on one of your browser’s toolbars, navigate to “Customize”, and select “Add or Remove Commands…”.





Once you have selected “Add or Remove Commands…”, you will see the following window. Click in the right window area to choose the new location for the Printee Button (button will be placed in position directly above your selection). Scroll through the buttons in the left window area until you find the Printee button and then click on it to select it. Click on “Add” to add the Printee Button to your toolbar, then click on “Close” to finish up.





And there is your new best friend for printing content from webpages.




Printee for IE in Action
For our example, we decided to visit the Accelerators Page for Internet Explorer 8. Here you can see the webpage before using Printee… Notice all of the extra content on both sides of the text area and at the top. To activate Printee, simply click on the Printee Toolbar Button.





A good close-up look at the left side of the toolbar…





And at the right side of the toolbar.





Time to clean that webpage up! As you move your mouse over different areas of the webpage you will see orange box outlines surrounding particular page sections. To select an area for editing, click within the outlined area and it will be shaded in green. Once you have an area or areas selected, choose the desired action from the Printee Toolbar.





Continue until you have the webpage fixed just the way that you want it for printing. Here you can see that we removed all webpage elements outside of the text area and removed the background as well (very nice!). Looking great and definitely ready to print!




Conclusion
If you are looking for something to streamline your printing and help you to conserve paper and ink, then Printee for IE is definitely a recommended addition for your Internet Explorer browser. Also, if you want quick way to print out selected text from a webpage in any browser check out
Mysticgeek’s article.
Links

Download Printee for IE (version 1.6.0.5)




Works On: Windows 2000 – Vista, Internet Explorer versions 6 – 8
Installed On: Windows Vista (32 bit), Service Pack 2

Protect Your Kids Online Using Open DNS

This week I have been covering tools to use within Windows Vista to help keep your kids safe using the PC and while being online. This article will apply will show how to use Open DNS with any Operating System to help filter undesirable web content. Simply put DNS (Domain Name System) translates IP address to an easy to remember hostname. For example if you were to type “216.239.51.99” without the quotes into your web browser you will be directed to google.com.
I wrote up an article previously that basically introduces you to Open DNS and how to add it to your router. Here we will look a bit deeper into it and show you how to best use it to your advantage. There is a lot of web content filtering possibilities which include specific sites, specific content, and adult website filtering.





The first thing you will want to do is sign up for a free account and download the OpenDNS Updater application. OpenDNS will automatically detect your IP address and will prompt you to create a name and download the Updater application.





After signing up go to your Dashboard where you can start creating rules for filtering, manage your administrator settings, and add additional networks. Basically your dashboard is where you will make all changes you need. If you ever get stuck or have questions they also have a cool support system which includes a knowledge base and user forum.





Lets take a look at filtering content. From your dashboard click on Settings. You will then be prompted to choose a basic filtering level from None to High. This might be a good choice if you want to easily filter out several categories. To view what the categories are in each level just click on View for a detailed look.





This is an example of the detailed categories in the Low filter setting. This helps you choose what types of content you want blocked.





Here is a list of all the categories available to block through OpenDNS. As you can see this service will work for your children as well as any user on your network and also for business.





You can choose a filtering level and add customized domain filtering to it, or completely customize everything. Probably one of the more publicized social sites you may want to block your child from is MySpace so I will use it as my example. Below the filtering levels you will see Manage individual domains. This is where you can get more specific in what your filtering. The two options are Never Block or Always Block.





Just type in the address of the site to block and click on the Add Domain button. You can then choose to just block the domain or better yet, block all of the categories in the sub-domain. This means although you block myspace.com if you do not block the sub-domains within the user can access some of the content. Any changes you make will take about 3 minutes to update.





Once you have created all of your filters and a user tries to go to a blocked site they will get a message telling them it is blocked and why. This is the standard message they will get.





Another cool feature is the ability to customize the message the user sees. You can customize it with say your company logo or a picture of yourself. So if you child tries to go to a pornography site and they see a picture of their parent … well … that might urge them to never try that again! This is an example of a custom message I made.



You can also get statistic logs which will show you what type of traffic was blocked and other stats to allow you to better filter content.


OpenDNS is a great way to protect your kids from undesirable Internet content but that is not all. Businesses can definitely use it in the workplace. I personally use it to improve my Internet experience. In future articles we will be covering a lot more on this incredible web service! To get an idea of how popular, effective, and trusted OpenDNS is you can check out a list of their business customers.