Priyam Vaidya's Blog

Windows 7 and Vista has a feature called System Restore that automatically backs up registry and system files whenever you install new software or drivers. This feature is useful when you install evil software that makes your computer run really slow. But don’t worry, System Restore won’t remove Windows Vista. Using System Restore in Windows There are two places that you can use the system restore feature from. From within Windows, you can just type restore into the Start menu search box, and you’ll immediately see System Restore at the top of the start menu: Or you can type rstrui into the search box and hit enter. Your choice. You will immediate see a screen where you can choose to roll back the system to the last restore point. You can select “Recommended restore”, and just click next, or you can choose a different restore point.   If you do choose a different restore point, you will see a list of restore points that you can choose from. How many times ...

If you are thinking of installing an application but aren’t quite sure what it’s going to do to your computer, I would absolutely recommend creating a restore point before you install that application, and here are the steps to do so. Note that most application installs automatically create a restore point, but you can do this if you are really worried. Open up the Start Menu and right-click on “Computer”, and then select “Properties”. This will take you into the System area of Control Panel. Click on the “System Protection” link on the left hand side. Now select the “System Protection” tab to get to the System Restore section. Click the “Create” button to create a new restore point. You’ll be prompted for a name, and you might want to give it a useful name that you’ll be able to easily identify later. Click the Create button, and then the system will create the restore point. When it’s all finished, you’ll get a message saying it’s completed successf...

if you spend a lot of time inside your registry editor, you might already know that you can use the Favorites feature to add in a bookmark to a specific key in the registry, saving you immense amounts of time when you need to check a bunch of different keys. But did you think about exporting that list so you can use it on any computer? Here’s the menu I’m talking about: For instance, here I’m adding in a favorite for the local machine’s Run key, used to launch applications across all users. Now when I use the menu item, it will navigate me instantly to that key in the registry, no matter where I currently am. As I added a few favorites, it occurred to me that I should figure out where those menu items are being stored… Now browse down to this registry key to find the favorites list: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Regedit\Favorites And there’s the favorite we just saved… so how does this help you? If you export this r...

One of the most irritating things about Windows is the context menu clutter that you have to deal with once you install a bunch of applications. It seems like every application is fighting for a piece of your context menu, and it’s not like you even use half of them. Today we’ll explain where these menu items are hiding in your registry, how to disable them the geeky way, and an easier cleanup method for non-geeks as well. Either way, your context menu won’t look like this one anymore… Cleaning the Context Menu by Hacking the Registry If you want to clean things up the truly geeky way, you can open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to one of the following keys… sadly the context menu items are not stored in a single location. Most of the menu items that used for all files and folders can be found by looking at one of these keys: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_...

What is the Registry? The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that contains all of the configurations and settings used by components, services, applications, and pretty much everything in Windows. The registry has two basic concepts to be aware of: Keys and Values. Registry Keys are objects that are basically folders, and in the interface even look exactly like folders. Values are a bit like the files in the folders, and they contain the actual settings. When you open the Registry Editor for the first time, you’ll see a treeview on the left-hand pane that contains all of the keys, with values on the right-hand side. It’s about as simple as an interface gets. The root-level keys that you see in the left-hand side of the screenshot are important. Each one houses a different set of information, so depending on what you are trying to do, you’ll need to know which section to browse down into. The interesting thing that most people don’t know is that 3 of the 5 i...

Install Portable VirtualBox to an External Drive First, get started by downloading the Portable VirtualBox installer from vbox.me . Run the downloaded file and extract it to an external drive or wherever else you want to store your portable VirtualBox system. You can always move it later, if you like. Launch the Portable-VirtualBox.exe program from here and you’ll be prompted to download and install VirtualBox’s program files on your external drive. The tool can automatically download VirtualBox’s files for you. After it does, click the OK button to unpack them. If the full version of VirtualBox is already installed on your computer, you won’t see this screen and VirtualBox will just open instead. You’ll want to uninstall VirtualBox first or set this up on a computer without VirtualBox installed. Launch the program again after it finishes unpacking files. After you agree to a UAC prompt , you’ll see the standard VirtualBox window. A VirtualBox system tray icon...