bamleo

Category: Windows 7 features

  • Windows 7 Features

    Parental Controls in Windows 7
    Parental controls in Windows 7 has lot of improvements and gives parents a lot of power to monitor restrict what their children do. Settings which can be maintained includes
        * Time Limits for a User
        * Game Restriction according to Game rating, content & Title.
        * Allow or block specific Programs.
        * Web Filtering
    Windows 7 Parental Controls is a feature in Windows 7 that can specify which PC games a particular user can play and which programs they can use. You can even specify the times when a particular user is allowed to use the PC.
    Windows Live Family Safety is a free download that works with Windows 7 and gives you tools to manage and monitor what a particular user do on the Web. For example, Web filtering and contact management help you manage whom a particular user can talk to on Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces.

    When you customize the settings for each of your children, you’ll even get an activity report that informs you how your children have been using the PC and what Web sites they have visited. And with the ability to view reports or modify settings remotely, you can keep tabs on your kids no matter where you are. Parental controls help you manage what your children can do on your PC.


  • Changing Library icon: Windows 7



                 In this article we are going to learn how to change your windows 7 library icons with easiest way possible. This article gives you steps to change library icons and these steps are easy and simple to perform on our own.


    Have you ever wanted to swap out the Windows default icons with something else? The new Windows 7 library icons can be changed with a hack to a text file, but there’s an easier way. We’ll explain both.
    Not sure what we’re talking about? Open up Windows Explorer, and check out the Libraries.

    For today’s lesson, we’ll teach you how to change those icons with something else. (It’ll also work for your own custom Libraries).
    Change Library Icons the Easy Way
    To change the icons out the easy way, we’ll use a tiny tool called Library Icon Changer from a user over at deviantART. Thanks to Pratik for pointing us towards this tool!
    Once you’ve opened up the tool, you’ll be presented with list of icons and libraries… just click on the Library on the right-hand side, and then choose the icon on the left, and click “Select Icon from dll”. You can also use the Select new Icon from file instead, if you don’t want to use a default Windows icon.

    Note that if you want to restore the icon to default, you have to click on the Library first on the right-hand side, and then click the Restore default icon button.
    Another note is that if you want to change out the DLL, you’ll need to select it, and then hit the Enter key.

    Once you’ve swapped out your icon, it usually shows up right away, or you can Refresh with F5 (though logging off or restarting explorer.exe might be required).


    Change Libraries the Manual Way
    Don’t feel like messing with a piece of software from some person somewhere? You can make these changes manually with nothing more than Notepad. Just paste the following into the start menu search box, or Windows Explorer location bar:
        ” %appdata%\microsoft\windows\libraries “
    Then drag one of the icons from Windows Explorer over to a Notepad window to open up the file.

    Inside the file, you’ll see an iconReference line, or if you don’t see it, you’ll want to add one like so:
        C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll,301
    The data in the middle is the path, either to the icon (.ico) file, or if you are referencing a DLL file, you’ll need to add the comma and number position of the icon in the file.

    And now you’ve learned how to swap out the icons. Awesome, eh? Alright, well it’s not that awesome. But still fun geeky information to have.

  • Managing Action center : Windows 7

                        In Windows 7 it can get annoying seeing the Action Center icon pop up notifications every time you turn on your computer.  Today we will look at changing the messages that it displays and even completely disabling it.
    New in Windows 7 is the Action Center which is an activity center that allows you to control system notifications.  This is definitely an improvement to previous versions so you can control the amount of annoying messages the OS pops up from the taskbar.  To get to Action Center select it from Control Panel or simply type “action center” (no quotes) into the search box in the Start Menu.


    By default the Action Center notification icon will be displayed in the taskbar and display messages about security and maintenance settings.

    While in Action Center you can view which settings are enabled or not and change them by clicking the different hyperlinks.

    Click on Change Action Center settings to turn messages on or off.

    If you are an experienced user and don’t care to see the Action Center icon in the taskbar at all, here is how we disable it.  Click on Start and go to Control Panel.

    Now in Control Panel select All Control Panel Items and then click on System Icons.

    The Turn system icons on or off window will open and here you change Action Center to Off.  Notice you can also turn other system icons on or off as well.

    Also if you click on Customize notification icons in the screen above you can select the behavior of other tray notifications individually.

    If you are new to computers or Windows 7 you might not want to disable the Action Center entirely until you get a better feel for it.  With these tips you can definitely control the amount of notifications that pop up.

  • Media center Live TV setup: Windows 7

    If you’re moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, one of the new features you might be interested in is Media Center. In this article we’ll walk through the process of setting up Live TV 

    Unless you happened to be using Windows XP Media Center Edition or Vista and are new to Windows 7, Media Center is probably completely new to you. Let’s take a look at setting it up for the Live TV
    Note: Windows Media Center is only available in Windows Home Premium and above.
    Windows 7 Media Center Live TV Setup: 
    Click on the Start Menu and click on Windows Media Center.

    Windows Media Center will launch…click on the Continue button.

    On the Get Started screen you can select Learn More, Custom setup, or Express. The quickest way to get rolling is to click Express. You can start with Custom setup, but it will take longer, and you want to get started right away. Also, you can change customizations at any time after you have it up and running. 


    Setup Live TV
    If you do have a TV tuner card, another thing you’ll want to setup right away is live TV. Make sure you’re antenna, cable, or satellite cable is connected to the card.From the main menu under TV scroll over to Live TV Setup.

    Verify the Region for your local TV service is correct.

    Enter in your zip code to get the Program Guide for your area.

    Agree to the Program Guide Terms of Service…

    Then you’ll need to agree to the EULA for Microsoft PlayReady.


    Wait while the Program Guide is downloaded and PlayReady is installed.

    After everything is setup you’ll be able to navigate through the Guide to view you’re favorite shows. If you like to use WMC to mainly watch Live TV, a cool trick is automatically starting Media Center in Live TV mode.

  • Media center sleep timer: Windows 7

      
                         Do you make it a habit of falling asleep at night while watching Windows Media Center? we are going to take a look at the Media center 7 Sleep Timer for Windows 7 Media Center. This simple little plugin allows you to schedule an automatic shutdown time in Media Center.

    Note: At this point MC7 Sleep Timer doesn’t work with extenders. If you’re using ClamAV or Panda it may detect this plugin as a virus, we’ve tested it and this is a false positive for these two antivirus apps.
    Installation and Usage


    After the installation is finished, you will find MC7 Sleep Timer located in the Media Center Extras Library. Click on the tile to open the timer and configure your settings.

    The Media Center  Sleep Timer will open in full screen mode. You can choose to shutdown the PC after 30 or 60 minutes, create a custom length shutdown timer at any 5 minute interval, or select the exact time you want the PC to shutdown.  After setting your PC to shutdown, you’ll get an audio confirmation.

    To set a custom timer length, scroll to the “Custom timer” option and click right or left on your Media Center remote or, the right or left arrow keys, to choose how many minutes before shutdown.

    To schedule a shutdown for a certain time, browse to the “Shutdown at time” button, and scroll right or left with the arrow keys on the keyboard or remote. When you’ve chosen your time, hit “Enter” on the keyboard or “OK” on the remote.
    Clicking the “Monitor Off” button will turn off only the monitor and “Cancel Timer” will cancel your shutdown request.



  • Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7

                           If you’ve got loads of windows open, and would like to tile or cascade just a couple of those windows, it’s a pain to minimize them, then unminimize the windows you want to tile, and then choose Tile from the taskbar context menu… but there’s a better way!

    Back in the Windows XP and Vista days, you could just Ctrl-Click on multiple taskbar buttons, and then select “Show Windows Side by Side” or one of the other options to tile just those windows—and it worked with as many windows as you felt like using.

    In Windows 7, this ability was removed in favor of Aero Snap—just drag a window to the side of the screen, and it’ll snap to fill half of the screen. Without a doubt, one of the great features in Windows 7… but what about tiling vertically? Or more than two windows?

    So what you can do instead is simply open up Task Manager via any of a number of routes, my personal favorite being Ctrl+Shift+Esc—and then hold down the Ctrl button while you select multiple applications in the list.


    Right-click on one of the selected windows in the list, and then you can choose to Tile Horizontally, vertically, cascade, etc. That’s it!

  • Windows 7: Quick Network connections list

                         One of the annoyances in Windows 7 or Vista is that you can’t immediately open the Network Connections list to see the list of adapters like you could in Windows XP.

    In Windows XP, you could right-click any network connection and select “Open Network Connections”, but in Windows 7, the only option you have is to open the Network and Sharing Center via the same right-click menu.


    To immediately open the connection list, you can just type ncpa.cpl into the Start menu search box:


    And up pops the network connection list just like I’m used to:



    You can also create a shortcut somewhere to the full file path if you want even easier access.


    Just use C:\windows\system32\ncpa.cpl as the location of the shortcut.

  • Windows 7: Assign a Static IP Address



                       When organizing your home network it’s easier to assign each computer it’s own IP address than using DHCP. We can assign static IP address in any operating systems like Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

    If you have a home network with several computes and devices, it’s a good idea to assign each of them a specific address. If you use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), each computer will request and be assigned an address every time it’s booted up. When you have to do troubleshooting on your network, it’s annoying going to each machine to figure out what IP they have.
    Using Static IPs prevents address conflicts between devices and allows you to manage them more easily. Assigning IPs to Windows 7 is essentially the same process, but getting to where you need to be varies between each version.
    To change the computer’s IP address in Windows 7, type network and sharing into the Search box in the Start Menu and select Network and Sharing Center when it comes up.

    Then when the Network and Sharing Center opens, click on Change adapter settings.

    Right-click on your local adapter and select Properties.

    In the Local Area Connection Properties window highlight Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) then click the Properties button.

    Now select the radio button Use the following IP address and enter in the correct IP, Subnet mask, and Default gateway that corresponds with your network setup. Then enter your Preferred and Alternate DNS server addresses. Here we’re on a home network and using a simple Class C network configuration and Google DNS.
    Check Validate settings upon exit so Windows 7 can find any problems with the addresses you entered. When you’re finished click OK.

    Now close out of the Local Area Connections Properties window.

    Windows 7 will run network diagnostics and verify the connection is good. Here we had no problems with it, but if you did, you could run the network troubleshooting wizard.

    Now you can open the command prompt and do an ipconfig  to see the network adapter settings have been successfully changed.

  • Adding folder to Favorites: Windows 7

                      When you open Explorer in Windows 7 you’ll see a list of Favorites in the Navigation Pane. Microsoft has already put some there, but today we show you how to remove them and add your own favorite folders including Search Connectors.


    Remove Favorites

    By default Microsoft has included some favorite locations for you that you may not want. The default locations are Desktop, Downloads, Recent Places, and Recorded TV if you’ve set up Live TV in Windows Media Center.




    To delete the locations from Favorites, simply right-click on the location and select Remove from the context menu.


    Add Favorites

    Adding you favorite locations that you visit often is easy. While your in the folder you want to add, right-click on Favorites and select Add current location to Favorites.



    You can also drag a folder over to Favorites to link it there as well.



    In this example we removed all of the default locations and added four locations…a FLAC folder from a home server, My Documents, My Videos, and our Dropbox folder.



    If you want to get the default locations back just right-click Favorites and select Restore favorite links. It won’t delete the locations you added, but will just restore the originals.


  • Windows 7 Features – Virtual Hard Disk

    Virtual Hard Disk

    The Microsoft virtual hard disk (VHD) file format specifies a virtual hard disk, which is encapsulated in a single file and is capable of hosting native file systems and supporting standard disk operations. This topic contains an overview of the new functionality that is offered in this version of Windows.



    In Windows 7, VHD can be used as the running operating system on designated hardware without any other parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor. You can use the disk management tools (the DiskPart command-line tool and the Disk Management MMC snap-in) to create a VHD file. You can then deploy a Windows 7 image (in .wim format) to the VHD and configure the boot manager for a native or physical boot of the Windows image, which is contained in the VHD.


    Benefits of the new and changed features of VHD

    Enterprise environments that already manage and use VHDs for virtual machine deployment will find the most benefit from the new features in this release. Although enterprise environments are moving an increasing number of applications to virtual machines, they still use physical computers to operate a significant part of the data center. For this reason, IT administrators have to maintain two sets of images: one set based on the .wim format for physical computers, and another set based on the VHD format for virtual machines. The VHD format supports physical computers and virtual machines, and it provides flexibility in image deployment and simplifies image management.

    An image format that runs on both physical computers and virtual machines also benefits developers and testers. This is because they use virtual machines to test new system and application software, but sometimes they need to run tests on physical computers to access a specific hardware device, like the graphics card, or to get accurate performance profiling. Native VHD boot also enables developers and testers to boot into a Windows 7 image without creating a separate partition on the physical computer for installing Windows.