tricks for the Windows Power Users

kiZZ kiZZ — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:25:31 +0000

Many criticize Windows as being not user-friendly to power users – you can’t do things the fast way even when you’ve used it for a couple of years. Here’s some tricks I’ve accumulated over the years to make using Windows (hopefully) as swift as a *nix guru.

Why should we use Windows when we want performance and speed? Well, I guess that’s we game players have to live for

Customize your Run dialog

This is undoubtedly the coolest and most powerful trick for Windows power users. To be able to type whatever command you want from the Windows command prompt is like being able to place symbolic links in /usr/local/bin

Create a directory somewhere convenient. A good place I used is
1
%HOMEDRIVE%:%HOMEPATH%\Commands
.
Now you’ll want to add this directory to your %PATH%. This is done by:
Press Win + R to open the Run dialog
Enter
1
sysdm.cpl
Append your
1
Commands
path to %PATH% in Advanced -> Environment Variables
Now you can place shortcuts (*.lnk) and even BAT files there and they will be run when you type the command in the Run dialog!

Useful commands for the Run dialog

Talking about the Run dialog, there’s a handful of useful commands you may want to memorize to speed things up a little bit:

notepad
calc: Calculator
explorer: Opens Windows Explorer on path
control netconnections: Opens the Network Connections control panel
sndvol / sndvol32: Opens the volume control panel
sysdm.cpl: Opens System Properties
dxdiag: Opens DirectX Diagnostic
msinfo32: Opens System Information
msnmsgr: Opens Windows Live Messenger

Enhance your clipboard with ClipX

The clipboard is designed decades ago. Given today’s computers’ memory size, there’s no reason to justify why we can only hold one value in the clipboard. Enhance it with this freeware ClipX. You can store like 25 previous clipboard entries (including pictures, files) and recall them with one key combination (default: Shift-Ctrl-V). Very handy for system admins and programmers

Opening Task Manager directly on Vista

Microsoft changed the popular key combination Alt-Ctrl-Del to open a screen with a list of not very useful options instead of opening the task manager. Here’s the new key combination to open the Task Manager directly:

1	Ctrl+Shift+Esc

Locking your computer from the command prompt

There are various reasons you might want to do this instead of Win + L, such as from within a BAT script. Anyway here’s how to do it

1	rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation

Putting files to the Recycle Bin from the command line

Oops, there’s no tricks to it. Download my recycle utility.