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Windows 7 lets you customize the behaviour of the icons that appear on your system tray, also called the notification area. You can configure the icons to remain hidden unless there is notification to display. This reduces the visual clutter on the system tray. The trouble is, Explorer keeps a cache of the icons and over time this cache can grow to hundreds of items. If you right click on the Taskbar and choose “Customize Notification Icon” you can see many obsolete items on the list. Some of these programs you might not even have on your computer anymore.
Here is how you can clean up this list.
Open registry editor by typing regedit in the Run box and navigate to the following key:
Select IconStreams and PastIconsStream and delete them both.
Now you will need to restart explorer, or logoff and login again or restart the computer for the changes to take effect.
This will remove all obsolete icons from the list except the ones already present on the Notification Area. Be aware that any customization you have done will be lost and reset to the default values.
Alternatively, you can use the Notification Area Cleaner for Windows 7 – a simple tool that automates the cleaning process including stopping and restarting Explorer. So you don’t have to reboot the computer or logoff from Windows.
In Windows 8 when you right-click on the lower-left corner of the screen, you open the WinX menu. The WinX menu is so called because it can be also launched by the keyboard shortcut Win+X. The WinX menu has shortcuts to some advanced system functions that are slightly out of reach, for instance, the Control Panel, the Task Manager, Device Manager, Command Prompt, Registry Editor, Computer Management etc. WinPlusX is free program that adds the WinX menu to previous versions of the OS – Windows XP, Vista and 7.
The program consist of a single portable EXE file. Once this program is up and running, you can access the WinX menu by pressing the keyboard hotkey Win+K, just like in Windows 8.
You can also right-click on the start button to launch this menu, but this actually launches two menus – the WinX menu added by WinPlusX and the default context menu of the start button having two options (Properties and Windows Explorer). These two menus are superimposed with the latter hiding the last two entries on the WinX menu. Using the Win+X shortcut doesn’t have this problem though.
You can use this menu as an application launcher because you can customize this menu to add or xremove your own shortcuts to it. These shortcuts are saved as a simple list in an INI file in the same directory as WinPlusX. To remove entries from WinPlusX click the ‘Remove Shortcut’ checkbox and then click on the menu shortcut you wish to remove. Be sure to uncheck the ‘Remove Shortcut’ checkbox once you are done, otherwise you will inadvertently remove shortcust from the menu when you try the launch it.
[via AskVG]
Windows would flash the icons in taskbar when it completes an action or is waiting for your input. For example, if you are downloading something in your browser and the download completes, the browser icon in the taskbar would flash. If you receive a new notification in your instant messaging program, the icon of the IM program would flash. Windows allows you to limit the time duration for which the icon will flash.
This setting is found under Ease of Access. Open Ease of Access from the Control Panel and click on “Use the computer without a display”. From the window that opens choose a time limit for notification.
Inside text editors, browser forms and text input windows, the mouse cursor turns into a blinking vertical cursor. You can set the thickness of this cursor. You can also set the thickness of the dotted focus rectangle that appears around selectable items on an interface. Both these options are found under “Make the computer easier to see” in Ease of Access.
In the screenshot, the rectangle around “Make the focus rectangle thicker” is the focus rectangle.
You can change the color and size of the mouse pointer from the “Make the mouse easier to use” option. Aside from the usual black and white pointers you can make the pointer change color dynamically by inverting the color of the mouse with respect to the background color. This makes the mouse pointer easy to spot.
When you turn on Mouse Keys, you can move the pointer across the screen using the Numpad arrow keys. Speed and acceleration of the pointer can be adjusted as required.
You can activate any window by simply hovering the mouse over it and staying for a few seconds. No clicks are necessary. This setting is also found under “Make the mouse easier to use”.
Isn’t it annoying when the Caps Lock gets accidently turned on while you were typing? Or the Nums Lock was off the entire time you were entering numbers? Under the “Make the keyboard easier to use” option, you can make the computer beep every time the Caps Lock and the Nums Lock keys are pressed. To make this happen, enable the Toggle key option.
Click on “Make the keyboard easier to use” option and then click the link “Setup Filter Keys”. To adjust key sensitivity turn on Bounce keys. Using this setting you can tell Windows to ignore keystrokes that occur in rapid succession, or keystrokes that are held down for several seconds unintentionally.
To avoid accidental key presses you can set a minimum time period for which the keys need to be pressed to register as a valid key press. Similarly, you can set a minimum time duration the computer will wait before accepting the next keystroke. This avoids accidental double key presses in short succession. You can also make the computer beep whenever any key is pressed, Hollywood style. (Also see Nullsoft Beep).
Windows can replace two types of audio information with visual equivalents. You can replace system sounds with visual alerts and you can display text captions for spoken dialog in multimedia programs.
You can completely turn off flashing icons and flashing active window that Windows use a visual notification clues. This setting is under “Use text and visual alternatives for sounds”
Have you used Ease of Access settings before?
Sunrise Seven is a powerful Windows 7 customization and tweaking tool that brings all the tiny configuration settings and options distributed across the operating system under one common roof. Sunrise Seven meets your customization requirement in almost all that concern appearance, performance, security and usability. Not only does it allow for quick customization, but it also helps you discover hundreds of settings you were probably not even aware of in the first place.
The interface of this tool is straightforward and simple. On the left are categories into which the many options are split, and on the right are the options clubbed under a particular category. These include UAC setting, performance, security, explorer and start menu, cleaning and maintenance, appearance and other miscellanea.
Most of the settings can be enabled and disabled by clicking on the corresponding checkbox. Sometimes there are sliders and selection menus. There is no ‘save’ or ‘apply’ buttons; the tweaks are applied right away, which is something of a concern. It is highly recommended that you create a system restore point before you attempt any change you do not fully understand. Thankfully, the program author offers this option from within the program window.
Sunrise Seven encompasses a huge number of tweaks but the program offers no explanation of the same. The only hint to their effect is the name. The majority of the settings are self explaining, but some of them are not explicit enough for the average user to have an idea of what it stands for. The Performance section that concerns with services is possibly the most cryptic of all. There is a button called “Configure another services” which doesn’t mean anything. Don’t click on it as it seems to turnoff services it thinks are unnecessary, and without warning.
The problem is further aggravated by the undesirable behavior of the program to apply the setting immediately. This leaves no room for experimentation. You have to know exactly what each option means and what their effect will be on the system. This is no tool to play around with.
On the bright side, you will probably won’t need any other tweaking tool if you have Sunrise Seven around. Aside from the system integrated tweaking, you can do other tricks like change logon screen, change start button/orb, pin a mini quick-launch-type start menu to the taskbar and change OEM information, branding and Windows product key.
This collection consist mainly of themes released/updated during the last two months since the last collection.
Previous collections: September, August, July, June and May and Windows 7 themes – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Copyright © 2011 All Rights Reserved Thesis skin. by Nitin. Converted into Blogger Template by TheTechFizz.
