Category: Windows 7

As you already know, Windows 7 accumulates a lot of junk files after some time of use. These junk files should be cleaned regularly for the optimum performance of Windows 7. Though Windows 7 comes with a Disk Cleanup utility, using which you can clean some of the junk files, but it cannot clean many types of files. Fortunately, there is a free third party tool called Cleano which is able to can clean many more types of junk files in Windows.

If Windows 7 lacks anything compared to the popular Linux variant Ubuntu, it is the live weather information displayed in Ubuntu. If you want, then you can display the live weather information in Windows 7 too, using the free software called Weather Center. The Weather Center is a system tray (notification area) application that will display the current temperature and will give you up-to-date weather information.

Windows 7 indexes your files on the local hard disk for faster searching when needed. The search indexing service slowly crawls through your hard disk and indexes the files and their contents so when you search for any file, it can look up in the index and show you the results quickly. But if you have made massive changes in your file system (like deleting or copying a large number of files), then you may want to rebuild the search index.

There are many reasons due to which you would want to disable CD or DVD burning in Windows 7. You can disable CD or DVD burning in Windows so that the optical drive acts like a read only drive and a user cannot write content to a blank optical media. In Windows 7, this can be done using a small setting using group policies.

When you shutdown Windows and if some programs are open, then Windows automatically terminates them. Suppose you were working on a document and accidentally try to shutdown, then Windows will forcibly terminate the open document and there is a possibility that the changes will not be saved. You can turn off this default behavior of Windows to automatically terminate programs at shutdown.

It is not unusual for you to receive a computer without any driver disks. If later you decide to format the hard disk and re-install Windows, where would you get the drivers from. In the situations like this, Double Driver comes for the rescue. Double Driver is a portable application using which you can backup and and restore the drivers installed on a Windows based computer. Double Driver is freeware and supports all versions of Windows from XP, Vista to 7.

Nyan Cat or Pop Tart Cat is an internet meme (of a flying cat with cherry pop tart body) which has taken the internet by storm in the last few months. The original animation of the Nyan Cat was designed by Chris Torres in April 2011. Since then many people have come up with various creative ideas for the popular cat, the latest being a Nyan Cat progress bar for Windows 7. This cute looking progress bar replaces the usual Windows progress bar with the Nyan Cat progress bar.

When a program crashes, hangs for a long time or closes down unexpectedly, Windows 7 shows a dialog with options to check for a solution online, close the program and debug the program. A program crashing is already a headache, checking for solutions online is too much to ask. Additionally, this option works only if you are connected to the Internet. Fortunately, there is a way to disable checking for solutions online in Windows 7.

Windows 7 shows image thumbnail previews in a folder but it just shows the thumbnail and there is not much you can do with it. If you have to perform some basic tasks on images regularly, like rotating and resizing then you might want to add XnView shell extension in Windows 7. The XnView shell extension adds the functionality for you to view the thumbnail preview of any image by right clicking on that image. The image thumbnail preview is show in the context menu itself, so no extra window opens up.

Windows 7 has a unique notification area – previously called the System Tray. It automatically hides the inactive icons and shows only active ones. The only annoying part of the Windows 7 notification area is that it retains older icons from older application too – from the programs that you uninstalled or removed ages ago. But there is a registry hack using which you can clean the old icons from the notification area.