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Windows Notes and Todo

Xah Lee, 2009-06-22, 2009-08-09

On Windows Vista Home Premium edition, how to format a usb drive to NTFS?

Can probably be done by the command “format”. Need to study its options.

How to set a app to have run just single process? (e.g. like Windows Mail, games, Second Life.)

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How to remove a menu item apps added to Explorer? For example, i want to remove the contextual menu “Add to Windows media player list”.

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How to add my own contextual menu item?

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How to control what apps starts up automatically when Windows starts?

Press “Win+r” to start the run dialog, then type “msconfig” to launch System Configuration.

What are some standard log files? In particular, when Windows froze or crash, where can i check logs?

Start Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management tool, then System Tools, Event Viewer.

When in a browser, i drag a image to a folder to save it. However, when the folder already has the image of the same name, Windows pops up a dialogue asking you whether to over-write it. Is there a way to just have Windows save the file with a new name with number appended? (e.g. like OS X.)

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Often, Vista has these strings:

S-1-5-21-1677906968-2349816792-3240826983-1000
S-1-5-21-1677906968-2349816792-3240826983-500
S-1-5-21-2052964817-3031232471-2881579612-1000
S-1-5-21-2916703103-2250467028-1779095260-500

the above are dir names showing up in “c:/$Recycle.Bin:”. Sometimes i see similar string when viewing a file's property under security Tab as users, lasting for a second or 2. What are these?

this way

When opening a Windows help file (.chm) downloaded from the web, Vista will popup a dialog saying that this is a potential security risk. You can open it anyway by just clicking the Open button. I want to open the file, however, the source is not a trusted source. Is there a way to check if the file actually contains malware code before i open? Or, can i set somewher to turn off scripting when launching chm file?

The following info does not answer my question.

See: “Viewing Downloaded CHM Files” (2005-06-23) by Rob Caron http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/06/23/431976.aspx.

“MS05-026: A vulnerability in HTML Help could allow remote code execution” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896358/

“Security Update for HTML Help released today” (2005-06-14) by Assistance Platform Team Blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/apblog/archive/2005/06/14/429122.aspx

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Is there a page that lists all control panel apps with their command line program names?

To do. Here's a temp list to be added as i go:

How to disable the contextual menu for drives in SendTo in Explorer?

Type “Win+r” to launch the run dialog. Then, type “regedit.exe” to launch the registry edit. Then, go to this location “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer”. If it doesn't exist, create it under the menu “Edit‣New‣Key”. Then, create a DWORD value by the menu “Edit‣New‣DWORD”. Then, double click the value and enter the value of “1”. Now, exit the registry edit then relog into your account.

When pressing “Ctrl+Alt+f”, it starts Microsoft File Transfer Manager. How to disable this key?

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2009-06
© 2009 by Xah Lee.