Category: Windows 7

You can add, remove, disable, enable and change passwords of user accounts from the Control Panel. But you can do the same thing from command line. You must be an administrator and issue commands from an elevated command prompt window to do this.

You can customize the Start Menu in Windows 7 to show the Recent Documents as explained in a previous article. By default, Windows only shows last ten documents you worked on. If you want to increase this limit, you can make few changes and increase it to more than ten.

Windows 7 has a default user administrator account with username as Administrator. But this is disabled by default as some hackers target this account. You cannot enable this account from the Control Panel. But if you want, there is a workaround to enable this Administrator account.

When you delete a file or folder, Windows sows you a confirmation dialog window asking you if you really want to delete it. Many people find it a headache as it is not necessary. Even if you accidentally delete a file, you can always restore it from the recycle bin. You can stop Windows 7 to ask you for delete confirmations following these instructions.

If you leave you computer for few minutes, it gets locked and then you have to enter password to unlock it. Also when your computer wakes up from sleep (when you choose Sleep instead of shutdown), it asks for a password. If you are a home user then this kind of password security is not required. You can disable this password requirement.

If you are an administrator of a Windows 7 based computer, then you can force same desktop wallpaper of your choice for all users. The users should be standard users and should not have administrator rights or they would be able to change the desktop wallpaper back.

Windows 7 has a nice tool called Problems Steps Recorder. You can use this tool to generate a file complete with snapshots of your screen and description of each step that leads to a problem you are having on your Windows 7 based computer.

If you want an energy efficient computer, then Windows 7 can help you out. You can make Windows 7 generate an energy report so that you can make changes to your computer helping it reduce energy consumption. Here is how to generate an energy report in Windows 7.

In Windows 7, you can pin any program on the taskbar by right-clicking on its shortcut icon and selecting Pin to taskbar. But this is not possible for the Recycle Bin. If you want to pin the Recycle Bin on to the taskbar, you will have to follow a workaround.

If the system restore feature in Windows 7 is not able to restore to a restore point, then you can start fresh and delete all your restore points. It is also needed in case of a malware infection to delete your restore points as the malware could have been present in those restore points.