Archive for 2003

Turn off the Clipboard toolbar

Office 2000: Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE). Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 9.0\ Common\ General. If any of these branches aren’t there, just create them – one by one – by selecting New and then Key from the Edit menu. Once you’ve highlighted the General key, select New and then DWORD Value [...]

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Turn off the Question box in Office

Right-click the menu bar or toolbar, and select Customize. Right-click the ‘Type a question for help’ box, and turn off the Show Ask a Question box option. Click Close. You’ll have to do this in each application to get rid of them all.

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What files are safe to delete

In your root directory: Anything with the extensions *.TXT, *.PRV, *.LOG, *.OLD, and *.—. If you don’t plan on uninstalling Windows, you can delete WIN95UNDO.DAT (Windows 98 only). In your Windows directory: Anything with the extensions *.LOG, *.OLD, *.- – -, *.BAK, and *.000, *.001 (and so on…) Any files with the following dates can [...]

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Improve Help and save disk space

To get rid of a particular Help Contents screen, which are usually useless anyway, just delete the .CNT file from the application directory. For example, to remove the contents page assocated with WINWORD.HLP, for example, just delete WINWORD.CNT from the same folder.

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Disable the Internet connection Wizard

Solution #1: The next time it appears, click Cancel, and then select the Don’t show the Internet Connection Wizard next time option. Note that disabling the wizard won’t remove the files from your hard disk (see Solution #2), which means it’s still taking up hard disk space. Solution #2: Delete the entire Connection Wizard folder [...]

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Problems accessing webpages on shared connection

If youre using a shared PPPoE connection and you cant access a website from any PC except the connection host, it might be a problem with your MTU size. See http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article04-107 for a fix

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Turn off personalized menus

Windows Me/2000: Select Settings in your Start Menu, and then select Taskbar & Start Menu. Turn off the Use Personalized Menus option. Windows XP: Select Settings in your Start Menu, and then select Taskbar & Start Menu. Choose the Start Menu tab, choose Classic Start Menu, and click Customize. Turn off the Use Personalized Menus [...]

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Turn off Thumbnail caching

The problem is that Windows seems to repeatedly recreate the THUMBS.DB file automatically. Here’s how to stop this from happening: In Explorer, go to Tools -> Folder Options or open the Folder Options icon in the Control Panel. Choose the View tab, and turn off the Do not cache thumbnails option. Click Ok.

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Turn off XPs Image Viewer

Once again, Microsoft isn’t following their own rules. The Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is set as the default image viewer for all sorts of file types in Windows XP. Unfortunately, choosing a new program as the default in the File Types window won’t change this, and there’s no option in the Windows interface that [...]

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Turn off XPs ZIP support

if you’ve already got a utility in place to manage your ZIP files (such as WinZip), this new feature can just get in the way. For example, Windows will search inside ZIP files when using Search – For Files or Folders, a process that not only causes searches to take longer, but one that may [...]

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