Category: Windows 7

Sometimes we all wish that there should be some way to automatically expand some common abbreviations or acronyms. Just imagine how convenient it would be if you type ASAP and it automatically expands to As Soon As Possible in your document editor. This is specially true if your job involves a lot of typing work. If you also have this feeling then you can try the PhraseExpress tool which is free for personal use.

Windows taskbar has stayed a very useful part of the Windows operating system for many years. It shows all the running programs and also contains the start menu button as well as the notification area. But sometimes when watching a movie or video or viewing a picture, it may prove to be a distracting part. You can always set Windows taskbar to auto hide itself, but a better way is to make the Windows fade out and almost disappear from the desktop. You can use the free Fade Taskbar tool to achieve this.

Over a long period of using your computer the files on your hard disk become fragmented which may reduce system performance because it takes longer to read and write files on a fragmented file system. Usually a defragment tool can also show you if you really need to defragment the hard disk, but no in-depth details are given. But if you want you can use the O&O SpeedCheck tool to find out how much faster your hard disk can become if your defragment your hard disk.

You can play loud music on your computer but not all the time – you have to be careful not to disturb your family members and your neighbors in the early hours of the morning and the late hours of the night. You also have to keep in mind not to pump up the volume if you have infants or patients in your house taking rest. Though you can manually change the Windows system volume up or down, but an automatic volume changer would be better.

By default, Windows automatically detects the contents of a folder and decides what kind of folder it may be – General, Music, Documents, Pictures or Videos folder. So if you copy some music files to a folder, then Windows may optimize this folder as a Music folder. But if you do not want Windows to automatically optimize your folders, then you can manually optimize a folder type for any folder in Windows 7.

Sometimes you set Windows to perform some time consuming task, for example, encoding a video or audio or downloading a large file. During those times, it is highly undesirable for the Windows to slip into the sleep or hibernation mode for the obvious reason. The free software Sleep Preventer is a small, portable tool which can help you easily prevent your PC from sleeping, hibernating or dimming off the screen.

The movements of your mouse cursor are limited by the edges of your screen. The mouse cursor stops moving if you try to move it beyond an edge. Although this is the usual behavior and most of us have adapted to this behavior, yet some of us feel it as a burden to move the cursor from one edge to another. If you want, then you can make the edges of your screen wrap for the mouse movements, using freeware Edgeless.

Sometimes when you boot into Windows, the system icons like volume, network and the power icon no longer show up in the notification area (system tray). This is very annoying because you can no longer quickly open the sound, network and power related settings from the notification area. This happens because of a registry problem in Windows 7. You can easily fix this problem by clearing some of the misbehaving entries in the Windows registry.

Everybody knows about the Start Menu button which stays on the left side of the Windows taskbar in the left-bottom corner of your screen. Although most people have large monitors these days, yet some people think that this Start Menu button is a waste of the taskbar space. If you are also one of them then you can easily remove the Start Menu button using a freeware tool called Start Killer.

Your network interface card (NIC) has a unique MAC address (media access control address) which identifies this networking device over a network. Some network administrators restrict network bandwidth, network access times etc. based on the MAC address of your NIC card. But you can bypass these restrictions easily by changing the MAC address. You can use the free tool Mac Makeup to change the MAC address of your NIC cards.