microsoft_windows

Long overdue: an OEM’s worst nightmare. Jeff Jarvis oughta love it, but I doubt Dell will. Nothing illegal here:

The PC De-Crapifier is designed to remove a specific list unwanted software in an unattended fashion. Before running, the user may select exactly what software should be removed. Currently, it is targeted for use on most Dell machines; however it will theoretically run on anything that has the software listed below…

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Like every power user, I’m annoyed with Microsoft’s “you’re about to hit a pothole” warnings. After installing a recent IE6 security update, I was smacked with an insipid dialog prompt every time I tried to copy an item (image or link) from Internet Explorer to the desktop. “Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?â€Â? Yes, I’m sure… I’m 100% positive I want to move or copy files from that zone. I must thank Dean Hachamovitch for the initial lead on this registry hack, although I had to change both the HKCU and HKLM subkey structures to eliminate the annoyance altogether:

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I don’t know how it happened, but I somehow lost ToolTip functionality in Windows the other day. I’d hover over an icon and NOTHING would show up. Needless to say, I was more than a little perturbed. I did a quick look around the ‘Net and discovered The Elder Geek had an answer that might work. It involves a bit of Registry diving, which is no problem from a seasoned power user like myself. To Enable or Disable Tool Tip Displays, fire up your Registry editor and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced. Look for “ShowInfoTip” and make sure its value is set to 1. That’s it. Shouldn’t even need a reboot in XP to see ‘er work again.

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Many new systems today are coming with integrated digital media readers instead of floppy drives. I say that’s a good thing. However, these manufacturers have a penchant for slapping in crappy icons for those drives – if they even bother to include icons at all. There’s no way of telling which drive letter belongs to which type of removable media – CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SD, MMC, or SmartMedia. I lived with this problem until today. Ponzi’s new machine installed a craptacular array of icons for her removable media drives. I set out to figure out where they were coming from, and ran into some amount of difficulties at first. I didn’t know where the icons were sitting; they were likely buried in a DLL. Then, I noticed that the CompactFlash drive was labeled “CompactFlashI/II.” Awesome! Now I had something to search for in the system Registry.

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