Restore Registry Settings to Default
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT branch of the Registry is used as a template
for newly added users. This means that the settings in this branch are copied to HKEY_CURRENT_USER at the
very first login of the user into the system. Obviously, due to this feature, we can use this branch to obtain the
default for a particular setting that has been changed.
For example, if by mistake one use has incorrectly changed the list of Suffixes defined by Netscape
(under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Netscape\Netscape Navigator\Suffixes and changed the mapping for
audio/mpg from mp3 to something else, thus making it impossible to start an MP3 player from Netscape,
one can simply locate the corresponding setting under this branch and just copy and paste it from HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT
to HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
While the above example is a simple one (as it's easy to guess since it uses text/string data), imagine the overkill
involved in guessing what should be the default setting for a binary value! With this trick though, you can simply
just retrieve the default value and re-apply it!
Bear in mind that you might have to either re-start the program(s) affected by the settings you
are restoring to the default values or if the settings affect the Windows session itself, you might have to log off
and log back in again.
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Preview Bitmaps as Icons in Explorer
You have probably noticed that every .ico file for instance, in Explorer, appears with a little
preview of the icon itself next to the file name. Same goes for cursor files (.cur) and animated
cursor files (.ani) -- and possibly a bunch of other file types. What is lacking though is the same
facility for say bitmap images (.bmp)! The answer is quite simple and it relies with the file
association for the bitmap file type.
Open the Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PAINT.Picture\DefaultIcon. Simply change
the (Default) value to "%1". Log off or restart Windows and voila! it's there.
Note though that Windows will take a long time for large bitmap files to generate an icon
and this happens every time you open the folder with the bitmap, as the icon is not written onto disk!
Therefore for large bitmaps it is recommended that you use the "View Thumbnails" view in Windows XP -- which
does persist the thumbnails created onto the disk, thus saving Windows to re-generate the icon/thumbnail every time.
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Make Windows Remember Window Positions and Sizes
Note that this tip only applies to Windows Explorer folder windows and not all of the applications
windows in the system.
When closing a folder window, if you want Windows to remember its position and size (for a few days at least, I
haven't figured out yet for how long is this information persisted), hold the CTRL button while clicking on the
Close box in the upper-right side of the folder window. This will persist the folder window position and size
so next time you open the window for this folder it will open in the same spot.
I believe the number of such positions stored is limited by internal caches held by Windows and obviously by the
memory available to Windows -- but I haven't as of yet discover a "magic formula" to indicate how many such settings
and for how long would Windows store.
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