Windows guides

Delete disasters happen. PC users make mistakes and they change their minds. Fortunately, Windows provides a first-tier safety net for files or folders deleted from Computer (or My Computer) or Windows-compliant applications in the form of the Recycle Bin. From there you can either restore an item or permanently delete it, and drag files or folders to or from it just as with any other folder.

No matter how many hard drives you have in your computer, each program you install will take up residence on your C: drive. The operating system and applications by default treat the C: drive as their natural home. This is a fine arrangement until your C: drive starts to run out of space. When that happens, life becomes difficult. Your system’s performance may suffer, you’ll start getting error messages when disk space becomes critical and you’ll have nowhere to install any new programs. Here we offer some tips for solutions, including moving programs to another drive.

Some larger software downloads, such as the Windows slipstreaming tool Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), are distributed as as an .iso file, which you need to burn to a CD or DVD in order to use. Or do you? To save you the bother of burning a disc, or to test it first, you can 'mount' the .iso file (turn it into a virtual CD or DVD),which makes it appear to Windows as an optical disc drive. All you need is an ISO mounting program such as Virtual CloneDrive from www.slysoft.com/en/.

In Windows 7, Microsoft wisely dialled back the prompts that drove Vista users to distraction. There’s no denying that UAC, which necessitates your explicit approval before any major system change, is a good thing, but Vista’s implementation was enough to make you want to switch it off altogether. No doubt that’s just what many people did. The Windows 7 implementation of UAC strikes a much more comfortable balance between safety and usability. Still, there are times when you may need to circumvent a particular UAC prompt. Here we show you how.

Windows Search has gradually improved with each successive version of the operating system. However, while searching in Windows 7 is pretty good, it’s geared towards finding documents and although it's a good thing that it searches file contents as well as filenames, that does slow down searching. So what do you do if you want to find a particular file, no matter what its type, really quickly? Try Everything.

If you frequently sing the praises of Windows Explorer for managing files, you’ll change your tune after trying Q-Dir. This freeware program from SoftwareOK allows a display of up to four windows. You can vary the layout of the windows and their number by clicking one of the grey icons in the toolbar to the right of the menu bar. 

Hard drives are cheap and spacious, and yet it’s surprisingly easy to consume every last gigabyte. If you’re a collector or creator of music, photos, videos and recorded TV, even a 1TB drive is easy to fill. However, there are three things you can do to reduce the overcrowding on your Windows PC: compress your files and drives, uninstall programs you don’t use or delete files you don’t need.

One of less than obvious tools Windows offers is the right-click menu within file dialog boxes. Give it a try: open an application and then press Ctrl-O or click the Open icon to display the Open dialog box. Right-click any of the files or folders displayed in that dialog and you'll see a context menu pop open. This is the same context menu you'll find in Explorer windows. From that context menu, you can perform all sorts of file tasks, from renaming or deleting a file, to scanning it with your antivirus software.

Are you using an unfamiliar keyboard and keep hitting the wrong key? Or are you typing on the same 104-keyboard you always have, but hit the Caps Lock key when aiming for Tab or Shift? Perhaps your notebook or netbook has some misplaced or missing keys? You can eliminate these keyboard annoyances by changing the scan code Windows sees when you press a key. The painless way to do this is with a keyboard remapper. Here we provide some tips on using two free remappers: SharpKeys and KeyTweak.

Windows tries to focus our attention on the documents we work with while letting us pay scant attention to such niceties as the folder or drive where those documents are located. The introduction of libraries in Windows 7 has been the latest evolution of this trend. Given this approach, most of us don’t think a lot about drive letters, yet sometimes those letters really do matter. That’s especially the case if you use external drives for backing up your data or for storing multimedia files.