Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If the On-screen Keyboard pops up every time you log in to Windows and you want to disable this behavior, this guide is for you. I’ve had this question emailed to me a couple of times before; it wasn’t until it started to happen to me, that I thought it might be useful to put up a guide for the fix.

It’s likely that you brought up the on-screen keyboard on the Windows log-on screen at some point. When you do this, Windows changes its settings to enable the on-screen keyboard each time you log on to your computer (after a restart or log off.) It’s not really much hassle to close the keyboard but, after a number of times, it can be tedious. Luckily, there’s a simple “fix” to get the setting back to default.

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Are you tired of manually changing your default printer on your laptop, depending on which network you’re on? Did you know that Windows 7 can set default printers based on your location (i.e., the network to which you’re connected) ? No? Well you do now, and here’s how:

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In this guest post, MSP shows us how to remap Windows keys without manually modifying the registry. Find out more about MSP at the end of this post. 

You may want to disable some keys on the keyboard; for example, if you are a gamer, you might have wanted to disable the Windows key because accidentally clicking on it might pause your game and invoke the Start menu.

Here is a simple way to disable any key on the keyboard of your computer running Windows.

The registry in Windows can be edited to “map” one key to another key or disable a key. Manual registry editing for this might be a bit tough. Fortunately, here is software which does this – SharpKeys.

How to disable the Windows key:

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Many programs use sound to some degree, such as alerts, music or other effects. Sometimes you want to mute sounds coming from a specific program or the windows system (Then you should read this post). If you don’t want to mute the sound entirely, but would like to lower it or let one program play louder sounds than others, well this is how:

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We like using Sysinternals tools here at Windows Guides; these tools bring core Windows functions together and help you administer to your systems more easily.

In this guide, we’ll cover the basics:

1. What are the Sysinternals tools?
2. How to download and run these tools on your PC
3. Where can I learn more about these tools?

Setting Windows to combine Taskbar Buttons when the Taskbar is full is a great way to save space on the Taskbar, but also to keep it nice and tidy. To access the individual program window within such a group is usually done by hovering over the combined button and choose a window from the thumbnails. As long as you only got 3 or 4 combined windows, it’s not a big problem. But lets say you have 10 Word documents combined in a group, just telling them apart from the thumbnail view isn’t quite that easy. Or, let’s say you want to open a new blank document to start writing, did you know you could do that from the Taskbar ?   Read the rest of this entry »