If you've ever installed a Firefox add-on, you've probably encountered a pop-up window like the one pictured here, which tells you to wait a few second before hitting the install button. For a long time, we thought the delay was because Firefox was busy downloading the file, but you know what? Most Firefox extensions are tiny. It doesn't take very long to download them.
All you have to do is type "about:config" into your address bar to bring up the advanced configuration screen, and search for the security.dialog_enable_delay setting. Then change the value to 0.
Again, keep in mind that Firefox implemented that delay to keep your computer safe. But if you're too busy to wait three seconds, this trick will help you regain a tiny fraction of your day.
Sure, Windows tweaking applications are a dime a dozen. Cheaper really, since you can pick up a few excellent ones for free. But we're always a fan of any application that lets you customize your operating system without mucking around in the Windows registry manually. Nothing ruins your day as much as changing a few registry settings only to realize that you can't remember how to restore them when things go horribly wrong.
That's why we're pretty impressed with TweakNow, a Windows tweaking tool that gives you control over a ton of hard to find Windows settings. Probably the coolest feature of TweakNow is that the free program automatically backs up any changes you've made. So you can undo changes you've made by clicking the "Restore Now" button. The restore function isn't quite as robust as we'd like. And the program's help file helpfully includes installation instructions and a changelog. That's about it.
But TweakNow does let you do some pretty cool things like change the title bar text on Internet Explorer, show or hide Control Panel modules, hide programs from the Add/Remove Programs dialog, disable the Windows registry editor, disable prefetching, and hide drives from Windows Explorer.
TweakNow is free for home use and works with Windows XP and Vista.
The Windows System tray has been with us for years. And while it's great to have quick access to some of your running programs through a tiny icon, once you've got a dozen or so of those icons running, the system tray can seriously eat into your Windows Taskbar space. Fortunately, Windows XP and Vista can dynamically resize the system tray to hide icons you're not currently using. But if you'd rather get rid of system tray altogether, here are the steps to do it (courtesy of the How-To Geek):
Open the run programs dialog box (either by hitting Win+R or finding the Run icon in the Windows Start Menu)
Type "regedit" to open the Windows Registry Editor
Find this section: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Create a new DWORD Value by right-clicking and selecting new DWORD or clicking Edit, then New, then DWORD
Name your DWORD Value NoTrayItemsDisplay
Set the value to 1
That's it. Next time you log out of Windows or reboot your system tray should be gone. All of your programs will continue to run, but you won't see any icons at the bottom right of your screen.
You can restore your system tray either by changing the value to 0 or by deleting the entry. On some systems, the entry may show up in more than one place so if at first you don't succeed, make sure to search your registry for "NoTrayItemsDisplay" to make sure you've deleted every instance.
EnhanceMyVista is a free program that configures various settings, hidden or otherwise, in Windows Vista.
EnhanceMyVista has lots of different options, including:
Registry cleaner and defragmenter
View all running processes
Recent items cleaner: cleans recent document lists, temporary folders, recently played items in Media Player
Complete customization for your start menu, taskbar, system tray, and Windows Media Player
The program itself is very straightforward and user friendly, with a menu running across the top with the different sections to customize. The options load below as you select each section. Some of the options are reserved for the "pro" version, though the free version offers enough customization to keep you busy.
All in all, a very good tool for tweaking the hidden options and removing the unnecessary headaches of Vista.
If you're looking for an easy to use application for tweaking just about every setting you could ever want to tweak in Windows, you might want to check out Fresh UI. While Fresh UI is hardly the only game in town, this Windows tweaking tool is both powerful and easy to use. And it has features that work with pretty much every version of Windows from Windows 95 through Vista.
Fresh UI divides tweaks up into a couple of different sections, including UI tweaks, system tweaks, and hardware settings. For example, you can customize Windows folder context menus, change the layout of the Windows start menu, or change what items show up on your desktop.
You can adjust most of these settings by making registry changes or using windows tools like gpedit.msc, but Fresh UI makes it much easier to adjust hard-to-find Windows settings. And best of all, it's free.
LeopardMOD 2.3 (for Mac 10.5 only) provides an easy way to change some Leopard interface options without having to use the (gasp!) command terminal. The tool utilizes the tabbed look found in some Mac system pref panes, with tabs for Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Safari, and Menu Bar.
LeopardMOD lets you change the menu bar to a solid color (white or grey) instead of the Leopard default of transparent. You can disable the Dashboard, change the Dock from 3D to 2D, add Dock spacers, and change Finder window titles to display the full path of the folder instead of just the folder name.
Of course like any good system-tweaking tool, LeopardMOD provides a "Restore Defaults" option.
There's a bit of an OS fanboy in all of us, but we're not all computer programmers. So when it comes down to arguing which OS is "better," we may not always have our facts straight. Andy Matuschak, on the other hand, is an OS X fanboy with a level head on his shoulders, and he believes OS X would be much better if Apple took a few more cues from Ubuntu.
Matuschak believes an operating system is only as good as its ability to avoid or solve problems, and that's what Ubuntu's really good at. For example, in Ubuntu, if a user tries to watch a video and doesn't have the proper codec to do so, the open source OS will attempt to find and install the codec.
But there's a solution on the horizon, or Matuschak would like there to be. He believes the answer is in Spotlight, a commonly underused but very powerful OS X feature which can be adapted to be a general problem solving tool.
Coming back to the video codec problem, if the user would like to figure out what's needed to play the video file, he types the file extension into Spotlight. The service would return a variety of options including codecs and programs. The suggested codecs and programs aren't necessarily installed on the computer, but, with one (or two) clicks, the user can then install whatever programs or codecs came up as a result of the search. It's merely a concept at this point, but Matuschak would like to make it a reality. If you'd like to help him out, make sure to check out his site.
There's no shortage of tools out there for tweaking those hard to reach settings in Windows Vista. Want to disable the user account control or at least disable some of the warnings? How about disabling auto-complete in file dialogs? You could muck around in the Windows registry, or you could just check a few boxes and let someone else do the heavy lifting. VistaTweaker 0.5 is the latest tweaking tool we've taken for a spin. It's lightweight, at just 664KB. There's also no installation required, which is always nice. And it means you can also run VistaTweaker from a flash drive. There's even a U3 setup file for installing VistaTweaker on a U3 compatible flash drive.
VistaTweaker also has one of the most complete lists of tweaks we've seen, covering everything from the Windows User Interface and Internet Explorer settings to disabling word-wrap in Notepad. And this is just version 0.5. We can't wait to see what's in store for VistaTweaker 1.0.
It doesn't look like the developer has posted the latest version on his website yet, but you can download it from Major Geeks.
Want to make a few changes to Windows Vista, but don't feel like mucking around in the Windows Registry? Vispa is a free executable (no installation required) that lets you make a whole slew of modifications to Windows Vista's appearance and behavior.
For example, you can easily convert your start menu and theme to Windows Classic, (which you could also do through the control panel), or you can enable "fast shutdown," which basically changes some windows registry settings to decrease the amount of time Windows will wait for unresponsive services to terminate before shutting down.
Vispa has a strong focus on privacy, allowing you to disable error-reporting, automatic updates, and other communications with Microsoft.
When you start Vispa, it also gives you the option of undoing all of your previous changes. If you've already manually changed some of the settings included in Vispa, you might want to be careful about choosing the restore option, as it might undo those changes as well.
If you're an avid tabbed browsing fan and upgraded to one of the Firefox 2 betas or release candidates in previous weeks, you undoubtedly noticed that the new version does tabs a little differently, giving tabs a fixed minimum width and displaying scroll arrows at the ends of the tab bar if you run out of space. This isn't a bad behavior, but compared to Firefox 1 which would show dozens of tabs all scrunched next to eachother without making you scroll, Firefox 2, which maxes out at a dozen or so when you've got your window maximized at 1280x1024 (and who maximizes anymore, really?), seems a tad limited. Of course, there's a way to change this behavior if you're willing to poke around, and Lifehacker gives you the stop-by-step how-to. In short, you go to about:config and change the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting to something smaller, or 0 if you want to revert back to the Firefox 1 functionality.
Whenever I'm troubleshooting Windows network issues (which is disturbingly often) I tend to look for Network Connections in My Computer (rather than Control Panel), but of course it's never there. Until now. Tech-Recipes has a great tip for adding a few new items to My Computer. Through an easy registry tweak (at your own risk, blah blah) you can add not only Network Connections but also Administrative Tools, Printers and Fax Devices, Scheduled Tasks, My Network Places, and Recycle Bin. Tech-Recipes says that you have to reboot your computer after making the changes, but in my case all it took was refreshing My Computer (F5). I'll be very happy never to have to dig around for Network Connections again.
Update: Here are a few more entries that you can add to My Computer not mentioned by the Tech-Recipes article. I dug these up by poking around the ControlPanel\NameSpace section of the registry, and they may or may not be useful under My Computer. Anybody know of any others?
Portable Media Devices: {640167b4-59b0-47a6-b335-a6b3c0695aea} Scanners and Cameras: {E211B736-43FD-11D1-9EFB-0000F8757FCD} Folder Options: {6DFD7C5C-2451-11d3-A299-00C04F8EF6AF} Fonts: {D20EA4E1-3957-11d2-A40B-0C5020524152} Taskbar and Start Menu: {0DF44EAA-FF21-4412-828E-260A8728E7F1}
I'll admit it, I used to be a Winamp snob. For years Winamp was by far the best Windows audio player available, and not too long ago the sight of any other app-usually Windows Media Player-on a friend's desktop would send me into a fugue. Okay, not really, but you get the idea. Nowadays Winamp's competitors have brought up the rear, but there are still things Winamp can do that the major players can't, and those who are still wild about its functionality should check out this Winamp Tweak Guide from TechSpot. Though some real power-users might say "so what?", it has some good tips on settings and plugins for intermediate users looking to move up to the next level.
A minor peeve of mine is the way Firefox tries to protect you from yourself, i.e. not letting you choose the "Open With" option when downloading certain files, and instead making you save it to your hard drive first. Usually this only applies to executable files, but Firefox's definition of executable is pretty broad, so sometimes this restriction kicks in even when opening, say, JavaScript files. Oddly, there's no option to fix this, not even in about:config. If you've had it with this "feature," though, there is something you can do, but as you've probably guessed already it requires editing some files hidden deep in Firefox's innards. If you're comfortable with the risk, though, click through to this tutorial on Opening EXE files directly in Firefox (the server seems a bit slow just now, so you may have to try a couple times).
Before its final
release, Windows XP's Remote Desktop function had a feature it now lacks: multi-user mode, whereby more than one person
could log on and control the PC at once. When the final version of XP shipped, though, this feature was disabled,
meaning if you log on with remote desktop, any other user must be logged off. Fortunately, there's a way to unlock the
original functionality, but as won't surprise you it's a bit of a hack and definitely at-your-own-risk. The process is
detailed by
Riccardo Raneri in his blog, but basically involves downloading an old pre-release version of termsrv.dll and
making some setting changes. XP still has a hard-coded limit of three simultaneous users, but that's still a lot more
than one.
If you've ever installed a Firefox add-on, you've probably encountered a pop-up window like the one pictured here, which tells you to wait a few second before hitting the install button. For a long time, we thought the delay was because Firefox was busy downloading the file, but you know what? Most Firefox extensions are tiny. It doesn't take very long to download them. 
LeopardMOD 2.3
I'll admit it, I used to be a Winamp snob. For years Winamp was by far the best Windows audio player available, and not too long ago the sight of any other app-usually Windows Media Player-on a friend's desktop would send me into a fugue. Okay, not really, but you get the idea. Nowadays Winamp's competitors have brought up the rear, but there are still things Winamp can do that the major players can't, and those who are still wild about its functionality should check out this
