Pin Recycle Bin on the Taskbar

The new taskbar in Windows 7 does not allow you to pin anything directly on the taskbar by default. If you tried to pin Recycle Bin already you would have noticed that it is pinned under the Windows Explorer program instead of a separate icon. In order to pin it directly on the taskbar you have to know a few tricks. In the end, your will have a dedicated Recycle Bin shortcut pinned directly on the taskbar as shown below.

The secret is creating a special shortcut that you can pin to the taskbar that points to the recycle bin:

1. Right click anywhere on your desktop and select New and then shortcut. 
2. In the location of the item box type in:
   
   %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:RecycleBinFolder
3. Click Next.
4. For the name type in Recycle Bin.
5. Then click Finish. 
6. Now your shortcut will be created but it will not have the right icon. Right click on the shortcut, select Properties.  Then, click Change Icon as shown below.
   
   
7. Change the icon file to:
   
   %SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll 
   
   Hit Enter and select the Recycle Bin Icon and click OK.
   
   
8. Finally, drag the new shortcut onto the taskbar and it will be pinned directly.  Once the shortcut is pinned, you can delete the original on the desktop.

What is svchost.exe?

One of the most common questions about system processes is what is svchost.exe and why are there so many processes running? First appearing in Windows XP, svchost.exe hosts multiple services within one process.  This allows the operating system to save memory by reducing process overhead by cutting down on the number of processes that need to be running.

Every system service such as Windows Update, Event Log, Terminal Services, Audio Service, etc. runs within svchost.exe.  Depending on the access the services need, they are grouped together and are run in a number of processes which explains why you see so many in Task Manager running under different accounts such as System, Local Service and Network Service.

Identifying what services are running is different depending on the version of Windows you have.

Windows XP

In Windows XP at a command prompt run:

tasklist /svc

The tasklist utility will show you what processes are running under each svchost.exe process.

 

Windows Vista and Windows 7

Task manager in Windows Vista and Windows 7 has been enhanced so you can easily see what services are running inside a host process such as svchost.exe.

Click on the Start Button, type in taskmgr and hit Enter. When task manager loads, click on the Processes tab and click Show processes from all users to see all of the svchost.exe processes. Then, right click on a svchost.exe process and select Go to Service(s). You will be taken to the Services tab with all services running in that process highlighted.

All Versions of Windows

Microsoft Sysinternals has a great free utility called Process Explorer that is like a task manager on steroids.  It works on all versions of Windows and allows you to easily see services running inside of svchost.exe.  Download Process Explorer here.  Once you have it running right click on any process and select Properties. Then click on the Services tab and you will see all processes running inside the host process.

How-to Remove Internet Explorer from Windows 7

For the first time since 1997 it is possible to uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows. Now full time Firefox, Chrome and Opera users can remove Internet Explorer for good. Best of all, removing IE will not break any of the thousands of applications that depend on the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Over the years many applications including AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player, Google Talk, LimeWire, MS Office and more use components of the IE rendering engine. When Internet Explorer is removed the shared rendering engine components will remain to make sure the thousands of applications that depend on the IE rendering engine continue to run.

While the rendering engine will remain for compatibility reasons the IE executables, shortcuts and settings will be removed. To uninstall IE on your computer, follow these steps:

Click on the Start Button and type in Turn Windows features on or off and hit Enter.

 

Then, scroll through the list and remove the check from Internet Explorer 8.

 

Click OK and IE will be removed.

How To Properly Disable IPv6

Starting in Windows Vista and Server 2008, Microsoft includes native support for IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) and is enabled by default.  IPv6 is the new computer address protocol that will eventually replace IPv4 which is currently the most popular standard. Unless you network has a specific requirement for IPv6, very few do, you can safely disable IPv6. Unlike other protocols, you cannot disable IPv6 by disabling the protocol on each of your network interfaces. While that will disable the protocol for the interfaces the loopback and tunnel interfaces will still have it enabled that can cause problems with applications.  The proper way to disable IPv6 is to disable via the registry.

First, click on the Start Button and type in regedit and hit Enter.

Then, navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, services, TCPIP6 and Parameters. Right click on Parameters and select New and then DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the new value DisabledComponents and hit Enter. Now right click on the new DisabledComponents value you just created and select Modify. Set the value of DisabledComponents to FFFFFFFF and click OK.

After a reboot IPv6 will be disabled on all interfaces.

Configure IP Address and DNS from Command Line

The IP address of your computer can be set from the command prompt by running the following commands at an administrative level prompt:

netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" static 123.123.123.123 255.255.255.0 123.123.123.1 1

Local Area Connection is the name of the adapter you want to modify. In single NIC systems it is normally called Local Area Connection.

123.123.123.123 is the IP address you want to set. 

255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask. 

123.123.123.1 is the gateway.

1 is the gateway metric. You can leave this as 1 for almost all cases.  

If you want to enable DHCP you can run:

netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" dhcp

There are two commands for DNS since administrators typically configure a primary and secondary DNS server. 

For the primary DNS run:

netsh interface ip set dns name="Local Area Connection" static 208.67.222.222

For the secondary run:

netsh interface ip add dns name="Local Area Connection" 208.67.220.220 index=2

If you want to configure the computer to use DNS from DHCP run:

netsh interface ip set dnsservers name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp

When you are finished with all of your IP and DNS changes run ipconfig -all to review the new settings. 

Close all open applications with one click

At the end of the day I always like to close the open applications to prepare my computer for the next day. Since I rarely reboot my desktop, I manually close each application. Depending on the number of open applications this can be a waste of time.   The people at NTWind Software have a perfect utility for this situation aptly called Close All Windows. Instead of manually closing each application just click the Close All Windows button on your taskbar.

In this article I will show you how to install and configure Close All Windows on your computer for easy access on the taskbar.

To get started head over to NTWind Software and download the latest version of Close All Windows.

After the file is downloaded extract the CloseAll folder to a permanent location on your computer.  Since Close All Windows is an application I extracted the folder to C:\Program Files\ where applications are typically installed.

For easy access it is best to pin the application to the taskbar. Drag the Close All Windows application from the CloseAll folder onto the taskbar.

Congratulations, you are now more efficient.

Open Command Prompt From Any Folder

Here is a quick time saver that I use all the time: Hold down the Shift key and right click on any folder in Windows 7 and select Open command window here. A command prompt will open with the current directory set automatically.