PCTips Box

In Windows XP you can open the properties of a network connection with 2 clicks. In Windows Vista it takes 5 clicks to open the properties of a network connection.

I’m going to show you how to create a few types of shortcuts that’ll make opening the properties and managing a network connection much easier and faster. This can make alternating network properties of a connection from work and home much less painful.

Simple Network Connection Shortcut

This section shows you how to create a simple shortcut to a network connection’s properties. You can place the shortcut on your desktop or quick launch toolbar and when you open it the network connections properties opens up. (more…)

There has been large number of special folders in windows and we keep accessing these folders from different locations. When I say Special Folders, I mean folders like My documents , Startup , Temporary Internet Files etc.

We cannot access all these special folders are scattered over the operating system drive and some times they are so deep in terms of the directory structure which a normal user cannot remember easily.

But a cool freeware called Special Folders View makes it possible to list all these special folders in one go.

As shown in the image above, Special Folders View displays the list of all the special folders in which you just need to double click over a special folder path entry to open it in windows explorer. (more…)

Recently, I was searching for a utility that can be used for using the windows clipboard more effectively for fast and easy copy paste of any text/image simply with a keyboard shortcut.

I found many application on web that solve the purpose but I don’t want to buy any application for this task, after a lot of googling I found lot of utilities like Yclipper , Clipboard History etc.

But still none of them were so much powerful in their freeware mode, then I found ClipX which is completely free.

What is ClipX?

ClipX is a tiny clipboard history manager, it can be recalled via a hotkey and supports both bitmap and text clipboards. It can be used to manage and increase the features of your regular windows clipborad. (more…)

For power users Command Prompt is where you go to get work done quickly and efficiently. If you spend a lot of time using Command Prompt, why not customize the appearance and operation to your preferences? There are actually a few Command Prompt customizations that will make it more useful and good looking.

Just follow these steps to customize your Command Prompt:

1. Click on the Start Button and key in Command Prompt and hit Enter. (more…)

Microangelo, the famous icon tool company, has released an updated version of their On Display application that allows users to easily change and replace the default system icons in Windows Vista. With Microangelo On Display you can:

Customize Windows icons quickly and easily. Just right-click on the icon and select “Appearance” from the popup menu. One elegant dialog allows you to change icons just about anywhere on your computer.

Use On Display to change icons displayed by Windows Vista, XP and Windows 2000. If you can’t change an icon with On Display, it probably can’t be done. Folder, shortcut, shell and system icons, On Display can change icons in more places than any other tool available. (more…)

Deep inside the bowels of Windows Vista, there’s a secret Administrator account, and it’s different from the normal administrator account you most likely have set up on your PC. This Administrator account is not part of the Administrator group. (Confused yet? You should be.) It’s a kind of superadministrator, akin to the root account in Unix, and by default it’s turned off and hidden. (In describing this hack, we’ll always use the capital “A” for the secret Administrator account, and a lowercase “a” for a normal administrator account.)

In versions of Windows before Windows Vista, the Administrator account wasn’t hidden, and many people used it as their main or only account. This Administrator account had full rights over the computer. (more…)

There are many methods that you can use to shut down your computer. The normal way is click on Start > Turn Off Computer > Turn Off. But here I will share with you how you can shut down your computer in different ways.

1. The fastest way

I always do this when I want to shutdown my computer. Just press the Windows key (on the keyboard) and press U key two times. (more…)

Many of the in-home service calls I go on end up being training sessions rather than repair jobs. That’s because beginners often have problems because of their inexperience and immediately jump to the conclusion that the computer is “broken.” Here are a few of the most common ones, which I generally handle over the phone during the initial consultation rather than making a trip out to the site: (more…)

In Windows, you can create a shortcut to a folder (for example, by right-click and dragging the folder from the Windows Explorer onto the desktop and selecting “create shortcut here”). Then, when you double-click on the shortcut, Explorer opens back up and displays the contents of that folder. There are four default characteristics when this happens:

1. It will open a single pane window (no Explorer bar).
2. It will allow the user to navigate out of the folder (i.e. to the folder’s parent and beyond).
3. The default is for none of the items in a folder to yet be selected.
4. If there is already an open Explorer window displaying that folder, then the operating system will switch to that existing view, as opposed to opening a new one.
All of these behaviors can be customized.

The first step is to convert the shortcut target from implicitly invoking the Explorer to explicitly invoking it. If you examine the properties of a folder shortcut, as described above (right-click and select Properties), you’d see that the Target field is the name of the folder. (more…)