My new OS is Vista, and even though I’ve only had it a few days, some things were already nagging me — so I found these registry hacks. Remember, always do a backup of your registry before trying them out.
1. I transferred a bunch of folders from my portable hard drive — including a folder with a bunch of ATI video card drivers. As I now use NVIDIA, I went to delete it, but it gave me an error (I guess it didn’t copy exactly right). Googling suggested to “take control” through the command prompt. A little more googling revealed a registry hack to add “Take Ownership” to the context menu.
2. Several programs I frequently use trigger the UAC. I’m leery of turning it off, so instead of that, I found another registry hack to quickly disable UAC for specific apps.
3. I have quite a few “portable” apps, so I was manually creating shortcuts for them. However, Vista annoyingly had the shortcut name as “File – Shortcut.” A quick google brought up the instructions for disabling this. (Unlike the last two, this one requires manual editing of the registry.)
4. In XP, I made use of the “taskbar button grouping” function to prevent cluttering of the taskbar. However, with Vista, the buttons, on default, will only group when the taskbar gets full. I found instructions on how to edit this. (I set mine to group when there’s 3 windows from the same program.)
5. Vista has this cool thing called “Games Explorer,” which will automatically find boxshots and information of better-known games. However, I play quite a few obscure games so there’s no boxshot. Googling brings up this article, which explains how to add it.
April 3, 2009 at 10:32 am
great article keep it up
April 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm
My Vista Games Explorer is totally screwed up (probably down to a b0rked uninstaller) so I just use Steam or the Start Menu most of the time. Although I will admit, it’s cool when it works.