Archive for 2 ខែកក្កដា 2008
Add Disk Cleanup to the Right-Click Menu for a Drive
Normally when you want to access the Disk Cleanup tool, you usually have to either find it through the start menu, or open up the drive properties window. Instead of going through all that, we can use a simple registry hack to add a menu item to the drive right-click menu.
Using the Hack
After installation, you can simply right-click on a drive and choose “Disk Cleanup” from the menu:
If you are using Windows Vista, you’ll be asked whether you want to clean up your files or all files…
And then disk cleanup will begin:
Manual Registry Hack
Open up regedit through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell
Create a new key called “diskcleanup” and set the default value to “Disk Cleanup”. Then create another key underneath it called “command” and set the value to the following:
cleanmgr.exe /d %1
The change should be immediate, just right-click on the drive and you should see the new menu item.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Add Copy To / Move To on Windows Vista Right-Click Menu
A hidden functionality in Windows allows you to right click on a file, select Copy To Folder or Move To Folder, and the move to box will pop up and let you choose a location to either copy or move the file or folder to.
Here’s the quick registry hack to get this working. As usual, back up your registry just in case. You will want to browse down to this key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
Once you are at that key, right click and choose the New Key option:
Now you will double-click on the (Default) value and enter the following:
{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}
Click OK and continue.
If you want to enable Move To, you will repeat the same steps, except creating a new key named Move To, and using this value:
{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}
Now when you right click on a file or folder, you should see the following options:
Let’s click Copy To Folder just to see what happens….
And that’s it. Useful!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 5 so far )Add “My Computer” to Your Vista Taskbar
I like to have the quickest access possible to folders on my desktop, which usually means putting something onto the taskbar if possible. You can add the Computer menu as a folder on the taskbar for the easiest access to your drives. You could also use this tip for any folder you want.
To add a folder to the taskbar, just right-click on the taskbar and choose the Toolbars menu, and then click on New Toolbar.
Just find the folder that you want… in this instance we’ll select the Computer icon and then click on Select Folder.
Now you can see the Computer folder right there on the taskbar. If you click the little arrows it will pop up and let you browse through all your drives.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?
You are no doubt reading this article because you are wondering why on earth there are nearly a dozen processes running with the name svchost.exe. You can’t kill them, and you don’t remember starting them… so what are they?
So What Is It?
According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in english please?
Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective this makes more sense for reusability… but the problem is that you can’t launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (.exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born.
Why Are There So Many svchost.exes Running?
If you’ve ever taken a look at the Services section in control panel you might notice that there are a Lot of services required by Windows. If every single service ran under a single svchost.exe instance, a failure in one might bring down all of Windows… so they are separated out.
Those services are organized into logical groups, and then a single svchost.exe instance is created for each group. For instance, one svchost.exe instance runs the 3 services related to the firewall. Another svchost.exe instance might run all the services related to the user interface, and so on.
So What Can I Do About It?
You can trim down unneeded services by disabling or stopping the services that don’t absolutely need to be running. Additionally, if you are noticing very heavy CPU usage on a single svchost.exe instance you can restart the services running under that instance.
The biggest problem is identifying what services are being run on a particular svchost.exe instance… we’ll cover that below.
If you are curious what we’re talking about, just open up Task Manager and check the “Show processes from all users” box:
Checking From the Command Line (Vista or XP)
If you want to see what services are being hosted by a particular svchost.exe instance, you can use the tasklist command from the command prompt in order to see the list of services.
tasklist /SVC
The problem with using the command line method is that you don’t necessarily know what these cryptic names refer to.
Checking in Task Manager in Vista
You can right-click on a particular svchost.exe process, and then choose the “Go to Service” option.
This will flip over to the Services tab, where the services running under that svchost.exe process will be selected:
The great thing about doing it this way is that you can see the real name under the Description column, so you can choose to disable the service if you don’t want it running.
Using Process Explorer in Vista or XP
You can use the excellent Process Explorer utility from Microsoft/Sysinternals to see what services are running as a part of a svchost.exe process.
Hovering your mouse over one of the processes will show you a popup list of all the services:
Or you can double-click on a svchost.exe instance and select the Services tab, where you can choose to stop one of the services if you choose.
Disabling Services
Open up Services from the administrative tools section of Control Panel, or type services.msc into the start menu search or run box.
Find the service in the list that you’d like to disable, and either double-click on it or right-click and choose Properties.
Change the Startup Type to Disabled, and then click the Stop button to immediately stop it.
You could also use the command prompt to disable the service if you choose. In this command “trkwks” is the Service name from the above dialog, but if you go back to the tasklist command at the beginning of this article you’ll notice you can find it there as well.
sc config trkwks start= disabled
Hopefully this helps somebody!
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Windows Vista For Khmer... 