Marc Orchant passes along a tip from PC Magazine that explains how to edit the registry to add “Send” and “Copy” commands to Windows Explorer and concludes with this comment:

After performing this tweak, you’ll have two new context menu commands: “Move to Folder” and “Copy to Folder”. Apparently this stuff is built into Windows but hidden for some mysterious reason.

Mysterious perhaps, but the reason is explained by no less an authority than Raymond Chen, the author of the original power toy for Windows, Tweak UI, in his February 2004 blog post, “What goes wrong when you add “Copy To” to the context menu”:

The “Copy to Folder” and “Move to Folder” options weren’t designed to be on the context menu. They were only meant to be placed in Explorer’s toolbar. (Right-click a blank space on your toolbar, select Customize, and pick “Move To” or “Copy To” from the list of available buttons.) If you add them to the context menu, you may notice that the “Copy To” and “Move To” dialogs start showing up when you really aren’t expecting them, for example, whenever you double-click an attachment in Outlook.

If you do the customization that Raymond suggests, you end up with toolbar buttons that look like this:

There are other tweaks widely publicized on various tip sites that have unpleasant side-effects as well. In this case, the effects are only annoying. If you want to add the context menus to Explorer, nothing bad will happen, but be prepared for an occasional annoyance!

(Oh, and Marc, how come I’m not in your blogroll?!)

If you expect to be a Windows power user, you must muck about in the registry. (Mere mortals, of course, should avoid the Registry Editor like the plague. Seriously. One slip in the Registry Editor and you can render your system unbootable or worse.)

For experienced Windows users, part of the annoyance of using the Registry Editor is having to expand each branch to find the exact key and value you’re looking for. It’s especially tedious when you keep coming back to the same key while you experiment with a new setting or troubleshoot a problem.

The solution is to use a well-hidden Regedit feature that lets you bookmark a particular location. After highlighting a key in the tree pane on the left side of the Regedit window, click Favorites, Add to Favorites. Change the default name to a descriptive label and click OK. Your saved entries appear on the Regedit Favorites menu, sorted in the order in which you created them. To remove a favorite, click Favorites, Remove Favorite(s). Click one or more entries in the list (hold down the Ctrl key as you click to select multiple items) and click OK to remove those items.

What do you do if your mouse stops responding? How do you close all open programs and restart Windows without losing any data? The secret is to know these keyboard shortcuts, which bypass the mouse. They also come in handy if you have a notebook computer and want a fast way to stand by or hibernate without having to mess with touchpads or other pointing devices.

Continue reading “Tip of the day: Shut down, stand by, or hibernate without a mouse” →

Trying to figure out what a program file does can be a challenge. That’s especially true when the file in question is one of many EXE and DLL files in a folder. When in doubt, right-click and choose Properties. For Windows program files and DLLs, the resulting dialog box contains a Version tab that includes all sorts of valuable information about the program, including the current version number and the developer’s name.

I use this technique all the time. Recently, for instance, I found that a file called Reader_sl.exe was loading automatically at startup. What is this file? A quick search revealed that it was in the Program Files folder, deeply nested in the Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader folder. When I inspected its properties, I found this information:

On my notebook computer, speed is at a premium, and I rarely read Acrobat files. Armed with this information, I looked in the Common Startup folder (%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup) and deleted the SpeedLauncher shortcut. These details can also come in handy if you’re considering an upgrade to an installed program but aren’t sure exactly which version you currently have installed.

Some of the most useful Control Panel options have shortcuts that are readily accessible from the desktop or the Start menu, although you’d never know it by looking:

• Display – To open this dialog box and change any Display options, including screen saver settings and resolution, right-click any empty space on the desktop and choose Properties.
• System – Right-click the My Computer icon (on the desktop or on the Windows XP Start menu) and click Properties. This gives you quick access to Device Manager and other system tools. (Click Manage to open the Computer Management console.)
• Network – Right-click the My Network Places shortcut (on the desktop or on the Windows XP Start menu) and choose Properties. This allows you to manage your current network connections.
• User Accounts – Click the icon to the left of your user name at the top of the Start menu. Then click Back to adjust any settings for your account, or Home to select another user account.
• Internet Options – Right-click the browser icon at the top of the Start menu and click Internet Properties.
• Date and Time – Right-click the clock at the far right side of the taskbar and click Adjust Date/Time.
• Taskbar and Start Menu – Right-click the Start button and then click Properties.

In Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition (and the expanded Deluxe Edition), we document the command-line syntax to open just about any Control Panel option, including some of the esoteric switches that let you specify which tab of a specific dialog box should have the focus. If you write scripts or batch files and you want this level of control, you’ll want the book.