Contents Starting off with disabling the Windows 7 UAC. ........................................................................................................ 3 Create a shortcut to clear the clipboard. ...................................................................................................................... 5 Hiding your recent items. .................................................................................................................................................... 8 Placing My Computer in the taskbar. .......................................................................................................................... 10 Burning DVD's with Windows DVD Maker. ............................................................................................................... 11 Adding Files for Burning and Customizing your DVD ................................................................................ 11 Customizing the DVD Menu ..................................................................................................................................... 14 Common Issues .............................................................................................................................................................. 17 Stop applications from automatically starting. ....................................................................................................... 18 Playing with the Windows 7 log-on screen. .............................................................................................................. 19 Change the function of the Vista power button................................................................................................ 22 Tag your documents in Vista........................................................................................................................................ 23 Adjust your scroll wheel settings in MS vista...................................................................................................... 24 Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 3/25 Starting off with disabling the Windows 7 UAC. One of my biggest aggravations in Windows 7 is the User Account Control Policy and I’m not the only one who thinks about Windows 7’s UAC this way. There are many blogs about Windows 7 and as it turns out on most of these blogs the tutorials about disabling Windows 7’s UAC are the most read articles there. What is User Account Control? User Account Control (UAC) is a new security component in Windows 7. UAC enables users to perform common tasks as non-administrators, called Standard Users in Windows 7, and as Administrators without having to switch users, log off, or use Run As. A Standard User account is synonymous with a User account in Windows XP. User accounts that are members of the local Administrators group will run most applications as a Standard User. By separating user and administrator functions while enabling productivity, UAC is an important enhancement for Windows 7. I don’t want to give Windows 7 permission to continue each time I install a program or delete something that might be of any relevance. These are the steps that you need to take for disabling the Windows 7 UAC. First open your Control Panel via the Start button. Type in the search bar “UAC”. Click on “Change User Account Control Settings”, under “Action Center”. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 4/25 This will bring you to “User Account Control Settings”; don't drag it all the way down because you don't want software automatically installing other apps. It's your system and you need to be in control. Just drag the slider to the second lowest setting so that the box on the right side shows “Don't notify me when I make changes to Windows settings”. Click on OK. Then the annoying “Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?” window pops-up, choose YES. Restart your computer and you’re done. Now your first tweak is a fact and please don’t forget. All the Tips, Tricks, Tweaks, Hot fixes and software that I’ll show you will NOT harm or damage your computer in any way possible. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 5/25 Create a shortcut to clear the clipboard. This next brilliant tweak is something I could have mentioned in the earlier tutorials because it really will help you to increase your work speed when you are working with large files. I will show you how to create a shortcut icon to clear to windows clipboard. Working with an empty memory dramatically increases the speed of your system especially with slower machines. And this is also a great tool to clear your clipboard if you copied something that you don’t want to leave on there for someone to see. First you’ll need to right click on your desktop and select “New” then “Shortcut”. Then type in the following command cmd /c "echo off | clip" Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 6/25 Click Next and give the shortcut a name then click on Finish. Now you can give the icon a little bit more flair by giving it another icon and assigning it a shortcut key. You can do this by right-clicking on the icon and selecting the icon Properties. Select Change Icon Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 7/25 Type %SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll and press Enter. Choose any icon then OK and Apply and you’re done. I now moved (CTRL+C and CTRL+V) the icon to a folder that I use for all my tweaks. Then right click on the shortcut. Select Pin To Taskbar This way it isn’t cluttering up my desktop and I have it handy whenever I want to use it. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 8/25 Hiding your recent items. This tip is especially handy when you work at a “public” computer in the office. This probably isn’t necessary at home unless you’re working with multiple users on one computer. The problem is that when you leave your computer for one minute, anyone could check what you are doing and the Recent Items (or Recent Documents) is the first thing they’ll check. If you want to hide Recent Items you’ll need to follow the next steps. Right-click on Start menu. Select Properties from the menu On the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window, click on the Start Menu tab. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 9/25 Now uncheck “Store and display a list of recently opened files” and “Store and display a list of recently opened programs”. Click Apply and then OK and you’re done. Placing My Computer in the taskbar. I wanted to have the fastest access always on my Desktop for my frequently accessed folders or the Computer Menu. Most of the time; when I am opening a lot of windows all at the same time, it would be a lot better if we have these stuff available right in the taskbar. Here is a tip that I wanted to share, it’s easy. Just right-click on the taskbar and choose the Toolbars and then click on New Toolbar. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 10/25 Here we can choose any folder we want and for this case, let us pick Computer and click Select Folder. We are now seeing the Computer folder right in taskbar. And if we click the little arrows, this will enable us to browse through our drives. Burning DVD's with Windows DVD Maker. Windows 7 allow you to burn different types of video, audio, and picture files. This feature, known as Windows DVD Maker, was first introduced in Windows Vista. The only difference from the previous version is the interface. Windows DVD Maker supports such file types .avi, .mpeg, .wmv, .asf, and .mpg for video, .mp3, .wma, and .wav for audio, and .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .png,and .tif for images. It can burn files to such DVD discs as DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-ROM as long as your DVD burner supports them. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 11/25 Adding Files for Burning and Customizing your DVD When you first launch Windows DVD Maker, it gives you an overview of what you can do. You can stop this window from opening each time you start Windows DVD Maker by unchecking on “Don’t show this page again”. Click on the Choose Photos and Videos button. The screenshot below is the main window of Window DVD Maker. Here you can add, manage and organize items that you want to burn, save or open compilations that you want to burn, and change or update the settings of your DVD menu. To add videos, pictures or audio files, just click on Add items. Browse and select the files you want to burn then click on the Add button. Another way of adding files into your compilation is by dragging and dropping them from Windows Explorer to the Windows DVD Maker screen. Note that Pictures are kept in a folder called Slide show. You can view the contents of the folder by clicking on it. If you want to go back to the main screen, just click on the folder icon with a green arrow on top of it. Click here to read my story? Or to download the free book preview with another 20 great tutorials. 12/25 As we’ve mentioned earlier, you can do the following before proceeding to burn the files that you compiled. 1. Save the files you compiled for future burning. Just go to the file menu, click on Save, and select the location where you want to save the file. If you then want to burn the compilation you saved, just click on file, and then select “Open project file…” 2. Remove files you might have mistakenly included in the compilation. Simply select the file and click on “Remove items” or press Delete on your keyboard. 3. Sort the order of files by clicking on it and then click on the up and down arrow icons on top. 4. Change the DVD Burner if you have more than one.