In Windows7, we can set default media player for opening video/audio files as follows.

• Click on Start button
• Search for ‘set default‘
• Click ‘Set your default programs’ in the search result.

• It displays list of programs. Among the list, select your favorite media player.

• Click on ‘Set this program as default‘.
• Next click on ‘Choose defaults for this program‘
• Select all the file types you want this player to open. Click save button.

Using the above steps, you can set any media player(VLC player, Windows media player, SM player) as the default program for media file types.

We can disable Recent items list which shows the list of recently opened files. It can be done in the following way in Windows 7/Vista.

• Right click on Start button in the task bar
• Click Properties

• In the ‘Start menu‘ tab as shown in the picture above, uncheck ‘Store and display a list of recently opened files‘
• Click Apply and OK

Clear Recent Items list

• Click on Start button
• Right click on “Recent items“
• Select ‘Clear Recent Items List‘

If you don’t see ‘Recent items’ in start menu then it mean that tracking of recently opened files is not enabled.

You may also like to read the following articles related to Recent Items:

Recent Items link missing in Windows 7

If you want to save one of your outlook emails as a pdf file, then you can do that by following the below steps. Outlook does not have any direct feature to do this, so we use MS Word as an intermediate place holder in the conversion to pdf file.

• Open the email and copy the email content(Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C)
  Open Word application (Execute winword from Run)
  Paste the content copied from the email.
• If you are using Office 2010, then click save as in the Word application. Office 2007 does not have this feature. You need to install ‘Save as pdf‘ add-on.  Scroll down further for instructions to install this add-on.
• Enter file name
• In the ‘save as type’ field, click on the drop down list and select ‘PDF‘

Include From,To fields and other headers in the pdf:

If you copy content from the email, it does not include from, to fields and time stamp information. To include this data, you can do a small trick. Open the email message and click on Forward. Now copy the content from the window, and discard the message. The copied content includes all the headers also. You can also use ‘Reply‘ button instead of ‘Forward‘.

Install ‘Save as pdf’ addon in Outlook 2007

Download the addon from Microsoft office portal

Double click the file and install it as per the instructions on the screen.

After the addon installation, you would be able to see save as pdf option in the file menu in Word application.

Related posts:

How to access your gmail account from Outlook
How to find mailbox size in Outlook 210

Like in XP, Windows 7 also enables offline files feature for redirected folders automatically.  User’s explicit action is not required to cache the files of these folders locally. This provides access to the files without any disruption even if the network in down.

How to disable offline files for redirected folders in Windows 7?

This can be done by configuring group policy. If you are a domain administrator, and if you want to disable offline files for all users in a OU group, then you can configure the domain group policy. Otherwise, if you want to disable it on only one computer, you can configure the group policy on the local computer.

In both the cases, the steps are similar and are given below.

Navigate to the below path in group policy editor.

User Configuration -> Administrative templates -> System -> Folder Redirection

In the right side pane, double click on the setting ‘Do not automatically make redirected folders available offline’. Set the status of this setting to enabled.

Close group policy editor. You can manually do gpupdate to update the group policies on your account. The next time users log in, they will notice that ‘Always available offline‘ is not ticked for redirected folders.

When you open a chm help file, you may see the error ‘Navigation to the webpage was cancelled’. This usually happens if you have downloaded the help file from web. The content in the help file gets blocked for security reasons.  I have faced this issue when I was trying to open windows commands reference document which I downloaded from Microsoft portal. The error was as below.

How to fix the issue

Open the properties of the chm file.

Click on the unblock button as shown below.

Click on Apply and close the properties window.

That’s all. Now open the chm file, and you can browse through the help contents.

Putty is a popular ssh client for Windows OS. It also supports telnet and rlogin connections. It has many configurable options which are described below.

Putty color settings:

The default background color is black. If you want to set white background, Go to Window -> colours. Enable ‘Use System colors’.

You can also modify the colors using the modify button at the bottom. Select which specific option you want to edit(background color, foreground color etc) and specify the RGB values or select a color using modify button.  After making changes, go to Session and save the settings by clicking on save button.

Auto login with Putty

Putty can save user name but not password.  To specify the user name, go to Connection -> Data, and enter your login id for the remote server in the ‘Auto-login username’ field.

If you want to auto login using username and password, then you have below two options.

• Generate ssh private keys and use these keys for auto login. For more information, check this auto login using Putty.
• Use an additional connection manager like Putty Connection manager

Create a separate session/profile:

You don’t need to type your server name and user name every time you connect to a server. Instead, you can create a separate session for each of the servers, and then load the session corresponding to the required server. This can be done as follows.

When you open putty, you will see the session tab. In the initial configuration, there will be only one session named ‘Default settings‘.

To create a new session, type a name in the text box under ‘Saved sessions‘ and click ‘save‘.

You can now go ahead and customize the settings. At the end come back to sessions tab and click save button to save all the changes.

In Windows 7, we can enable remote desktop as follows.

•  Open computer properties and click Remote settings. (Or you can execute sysdm.cpl from Run which opens up system properties window. click on Remote tab)
• select the second check button ‘Allow connections from computer running any version of remote desktop‘ . If the other machine which you would be connecting from is running on Windows 7 then you can select the third check button “Allow connections only from Remote computers running remote desktop with Network level authentication (more secure)“. If you would be using down level OS like XP, Server2003 then select the second check button.

Group policy settings

Enable remote desktop

Open group policy object editor and navigate to the below node.

Computer Configuration -> Administrative templates -> Windows components -> Remote desktop Services -> Remote desktop session host -> Connections

In the right side pane, double click on the setting ‘Allow users to connect remotely using remote desktop services‘ and set the status to enabled.

Disable remote desktop

To disable remote desktop using group policy settings, you need to set the status of the setting described above to disabled. If you want to leave the choice to the individual users, you should set the status to ‘Not configured‘.

Related Posts:

Windows Remote desktop : Everything you would need to know
Delete remote desktop history

What to do if your disk is filled up and you want to make some free space somehow? Well, this article explains different steps you can do to get more free space.

1. Run disk clean manager. This tool identifies certain categories of files which are least required. You can run your Windows without having these files on disk.  I advise you to go through each of the listed categories and manually select or unselect each one. When I run this tool on my system, it does not check ‘debug dump files‘ and ‘system memory dump files‘. You may select these files for deletion unless you want them for debugging crashes.

2.  Remove unwanted software: Run appwiz.cpl and uninstall the programs that you do not need any longer. You might have installed some application for just one time use, you may uninstall all such software.

3.  Remove duplicate files: You might have created multiple copies of same files(documents, photos) on the disk. Use a duplicated finder to identify and delete all such files.

4.  Defrag the disk:  Run dfrgui from Run and click ‘Defragment disk‘. You may even schedule monthly automatic defragmentation from this tool. You can run defragmentation from command prompt also.

5.  Remove restore points: Run system restore(rstrui) and delete restore points that are not necessary to have. Each restore point you have on your system may take 3 to 5 percent of the used space on the disk. It may consume at least 300 MB space. If you have multiple restore points, you may delete them except the latest one. In case if you have only one restore point, it is not advisable to delete it.

6.  Delete software installers:  You would have downloaded lot of software installers/packages. Since the software is already installed on your computer, most probably you will not need them again. Even if needed, you can download them again. I usually keep all the downloaded software in a separate folder, If I need to free up space on the disk, I go to this folder and delete those big files.

7.  Find big files: Using Windows search feature, you can identify the files that are consuming most of the disk space. In Windows 7, this can be done as follows. Open ‘Computer’ and click the drive you want to free space on. Now in the right side search bix, type ‘size:gigantic‘ and press enter. This will list out all the files that are using > 128MB space. Check if any of those files are not required and if so delete them. Don’t bulk delete them, you might have important files in the list.

If the above tips have helped you in getting more free space on your computer, please share your comments below.

More advanced tips:

8.  Remove hiberfil.sys:  You can disable hibernation on the system and get rid of C:\hiberfil.sys file. This would immediately free up 1 to 3GB space.

9.  Enable compression:  This might not have effect for audio, video files and pictures. But it would significantly reduce the disk usage for text files.

10.  Remove offline files : If you are an enterprise user and are using offline files for the network shares you access, then you can consider deleting this offline files cache. Do this only if you have not modified the files locally.

Microsoft download manager is not a well known product among Windows users but it’s very useful one. This allows one to download large sized files even with network interruptions. It automatically resumes the download when the network is back up. You can also manually pause and resume the download whenever you want to.

Download Microsoft Download manager

Below is a snapshot of the application.

We can log on to a Windows 7 computer with a finger swipe. The only thing you need to have on your laptop is a fingerprint scanning biometric device.  In this post we take you through how to configure finger print logon and the related settings for it.

1. First check if you have a biometric device detected by Windows 7.  Open Control panel -> Biometric devices. Your fingerprint scanning device should be listed here as shown below.

2.  Click ‘Change biometric settings’. Ensure that biometrics is on and users are allowed to log on to both local computer and domain using biometric devices.

3. Come back to the biometric devices windows and click ‘Use your fingerprint with Windows‘. If you have already enrolled, the link will be displayed as ‘mange your fingerprint data‘(see the above pic).

4. The next steps will depend on your fingerprint device make. But typically you would need to provide your Windows login password and then get your finger prints scanned. On my ThinkPad laptop which has TouchChip fingerprint scanner, I had to do the following to enable fingerprint login.

• Entered my account password.
• Selected the finger I wanted to use for logon, did multiple finger swipes to feed in the finger prints.
• Closed the finger print software application.

You will have to do similar steps on your Windows 7 computer. After doing these, you can see the status as ‘Enrolled‘ in the biometric devices window. From now on you can use fingerprint login as an alternative to password login.

How to disable fingerprint log on?

Open Biometric devices from Control panel. Go to ‘Change biometric settings’. Select ‘biometrics off‘

How to enable/disable finger print logon using group policy?

The group policy settings for biometric usage can be found in the below path.

Computer Configuration -> Administrative templates -> Windows components -> Biometric devices.

To disable fingerprint login, you can configure the setting ‘Allow users to log on using biometrics’ to disabled.

I can’t change biometric settings. On/Off buttons are greyed out.

It means that the settings are configured by administrator of the system/domain using group policies. If you are administrator of the local system, check the settings mentioned in the answer for the previous question.