Can’t pin folders to my Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar

When you right-click Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar in Windows 7, you can see list of recent items (i.e. recently opened folders) with an option to pin some of them permanently. On some Windows 7 systems user may experience issues with recent items and pinned entries list not being displayed, missing or cleared without reason. New items cannot be added to these lists.

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Strange Windows 7 folder names

After installing Service Pack 1 over your Windows 7 (or some other update “around”) you may find, that some of your folders has now a strange name. This happen mostly in non-English versions of Windows 7.

To fix this problem, turn displaying of hidden files on, locate desktop.ini file, edit it and remove LocalizedResourceName key from it or delete entire desktop.ini file at all.

Disable Program Compatibility Assistant

Windows Program Compatibility Assistant can be a real pain in the ass when you often use programs, scripts or applications that runs just for a second or two and then terminates itself. It can be also painful, when you run some software by a mistake and quickly close it right after starting. In each such scenario you’ll be nagged with a stupid message asking, if you want to run this program again.

To completely disable Program Compatibility Assistant follow these simple steps:

  1. Run Registry Editor (regedit.exe).
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat branch
  3. Create new key named DisablePCA of dword type and give it 00000001 value

Or… save the following code as a .reg file somewhere:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat]
"DisablePCA"=dword:00000001

Then double-click saved file and confirm addition to Windows Registry.

God Mode or admin’s power panel in Windows 7

The magic word is Admin.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

Create a new folder in any folder you like (make it root folder on your first drive or deeply hidden secret dir) and use exactly above string as folder’s name. Folder’s icon will change to confirm that you’ve succeeded.

Double clicking this folder — instead of showing contents of empty directory — will give you an access to a really impressive list of shortcuts to most powerful and hidden features of Windows 7.

Happy hacking, folks!

FujitsuSiemens AmiloPro V2060 no HDD found

When installing Windows XP Professional on FujitsuSiemens AmiloPro V2060 laptop in most cases it will turn out, that the hard disk is not found. This is because many Windows XP Installation CDs do not contain drivers for the Intel SATA HDD support, that is available in AmiloPro family of FujitsuSiemens laptops. This article may help in this situation.

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Quickly switching network connection in Windows XP

A lot of people uses the same notebook to access Internet from many places or networks. For example from home and office. If all these networks are using DHCP-assigned IP addresses and network parameters or if you’re using different medium (i.e. One at home, wireless at work) then there is no problem. However, if both networks uses static parameters over the same medium, then the only option you’re left is manually changing network parameters, as Windows does not allow you to create more than one connection for single hardware (network medium). Hopefully, you can easy your life with a set of simple batch scripts.

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