Fix Windows Vista Errors

You may have noticed the ease of access button on your Vista logon screen in the bottom right hand corner, this is designed so that anyone with a disability can change setting etc so they can easily use the PC.

But what this also means is that even though no one can access your computer unless they know the password, anyone can walk up and still change your ease of access settings.

You may want to disable this button, you do this by;

• Download the software here
• Run the software as an administrator
• Now click OK
• You will now come to a screen with an option to disable ease of access
• Click disable
• You should still be able to see the ease of access button on logon screen, but it will not be active

This is a very easy tweak to perform but can be very handy if you want to quickly open a web page or a page in explorer.

To add an address bar to your taskbar just do this;

• Right click in your taskbar
• Go to toolbars
• Click on address
• You will see an address bar now in your taskbar

You can now just add a url into the bar and the page will open up in your browser, or alternatively you can navigate to a page in explorer from here.

Now this tweak probably sounds useless to many of our users out there, but it is actually a handy hack for some.

If you do design or work with images etc you would have encountered a time where you needed to move the arrow 1 or 2 pixels but found it tough with the mouse, this is where Mouse Keys is useful.

Mouse Keys is a small application that allows you to control your mouse arrow with your numbers keys, thus allowing you to easily move it 1 pixel at a time.

To activate Mouse Keys just follow this;

• Open control panel
• Click ease of access
• Click change how your mouse works
• Click setup mouse keys
• Here you can change the setting to your liking
• Click apply
• You should use the shortcut of Alt+Shift+Num Lock

This happened to me recently and at first I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I looked into more and found that the solution was easy.

Basically what happens is that in an explorer folder it shows the files icon but does not show the name, so I had a bunch of similar icons with no names.

What the problem here is that Windows believes you have set the folder as a pictures folder and selected to hide the files names. I have no idea why this happens (unless you have selected that option), but the fix is quite easy;

• Navigate to the folder
• Right click and select customize this folder
• Click the customize tab
• In the top dropdown select pictures and videos as your folder type
• Apply and OK
• Now back to the folder and select view (you may need to hit alt first)
• Uncheck hide file names
• Your file names should be back again

If you are unsure what a notification balloon is then look at this image and I’m sure you have seen it a bunch of times before on your Vista desktop;

To disable these notification balloons you need to perform a basic registry edit;

• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
• Now create a new 32-bit DWORD and name it
  • EnableBalloonTips
• Set the value to 0
• Reboot your computer

What does that title mean? Basically I’m going to explain here how to add a link to your control panel on the right click menu from your desktop, it is just another handy shortcut to the control panel.

You need to do a registry edit here so backup your registry;

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell
• Create a new key here called Control Panel
• In the Control Panel key create a new key called command
• Modify the default value in the command key and put this;
  • rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL

You will now be able to see the shortcut if you right click your desktop. If you need to get rid of the shortcut for any reason just go and delete the Control Panel key.

I don’t really know why they still make a caps lock button a vital button on the keyboard, when it probably gets used less than that squiggly line button.

If you want to disable the caps lock button you will need to to a registry edit so backup your registry;

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout
• In the right hand blank section right click and select new > binary value
• Call it Scancode Map
• Right click Scancode Map and select modify
• You now have to type these number in exact this order with no commas
  • 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 3a 00 00 00 00 00
• It should now look like this;

• Now click OK
• Close regedit and reboot your computer

If you want to enable your caps lock again just go back into that location in your regedit and simply delete the Scancode Map binary value.

If you are anything like me and use the control panel endlessly then you will love this little trick that allows you to make a shortcut to the control panel. I have looked around and as yet I cannot find a normal shortcut to the control panel so I used this trick.

First you need to make a control panel shortcut in the quick launch menu;

• Open start
• Click on control panel
• Drag the icon to your quick launch area

Once you have setup a shortcut to the control panel in your quick launch area you can now use a direct shortcut to the panel from your keyboard.

In Vista they have set shortcuts from your quicklaunch using the windows key, with winkey+1 being the first quick launch button and so on.

So if your control panel icon is the third quick launch icon then just type winkey+3 and you have a shortcut to the control panel.

Here is a great tweak that I used to use on XP but completely forgot about when I upgraded to Vista, it reduces the shutdown speed using WaitToKillServiceTimeout.

This setting in the registry allows you to specify a length of time that the service control manager must wait for services to complete the shut-down request before shutting down.

So if a value of 20,000 is set then your PC waits 20 seconds for your services to finish before shutting down. This is great to speed up shutdown just don’t go to crazy and try to make it too fast first go - and backup your registry.

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
• Find this string - WaitToKillServiceTimeout
• Right click and select modify
• Now as I said earlier don’t put down 1000 first time, try using 10,000
• Reboot and test it

You may want to try and reduce the value of WaitToKillServiceTimeout, but just do it by a 1000 at a time.

You may not release this but in Internet Explorer you can only download a maximum of 2 files at once, so if you have a good internet connection you may want to up this for faster downloading.

This is a registry tweak so backup your registry.

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location;
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
• Create a new DWORD;
  • MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
  • Set the value to 10
• Create another DWORD
  • MaxConnectionsPerServer
  • Set the value to 10
• Exit regedit

You will now find the the maximum amount of files you can download in your Internet Explorer has incresed from 2 to 10.