Tips and Tricks to Boost your Windows 7 performance ~ Part1: Registry Hacks, UAC & Keyboard shortcuts

1. Disable Windows Program compatibility Assistance

Well the program compatibility assistance is great to assist you through the installation of many programs but often it comes up with false notification. It gets very much annoying sometime to get the above screen just after installing some program although it is running correctly! Here is the step to remove this notification completely.

• Goto Start menu > Control Panel and search for “Group“. This should give you a search result “Edit Group Policy“.
• Click on it and navigate to “Computer Configuration” > “Administrative Template” > “Windows Component” > “Application Compatibility“.
• Now double click on “Turn off Program Compatibility Assistance” and set the value to enable.

You are done now! To turn this feature on again all what you need to do is follow the same steps but at the last step make it “Disable”

2. Speed up Taskbar thumbnail preview

When ever you Hover your mouse over any taskbar icon it shows up a small thumbnail preview of that window. It is great but some people find it to be a little slow. Actually there is a delay time set on the Thumbnail Preview. With the help of a small registry tweak you can set it to any time you want. Here is how

• Click on start and type regedit at search bar
• Navigate to following key in left pan of registry editor
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse
  and Locate MouseHoverTime key in right pan of registry editor. Illustration is shown on the image below
• Simply double click on the key and set any NUMERICAL value [in millisecond] ~ For better speed set any value less than 100.

Now just close the registry editor and hover on the taskbar to see the result.

3. Must know Windows 7 key Shortcuts

Windows 7 has many keyboard shortcuts which make our life easier. It really takes a little effort to remember them but once we get familiar these proves to be really time saving. Here are some a basic and must know key-board shortcuts… Remember that Windows key means the key in between Ctrl and Alt key on the left side of your keyboard having Windows Logo

1. Windows + T: Similar to Alt+Tab but cycles directly through the taskbar Thumbnails.
2. Windows + Space: Makes every open window Transparent ~ Similar to moving your miuse to the bottom right of your taskbar.
3. Ctrl+Shift+Click: Launch any program holding Ctrl and Shift key to run it as Administrator.
4. Ctrl+Click: Hold down Ctrl key and click on any icon on the taskbar to cycle through its multiple
5. Windows + Left/Right/Up/Down Navigation keys: Pressing Windows + Up navigation key maximizes your current windows and down key restores it. Whereas Windows + Left and Right aligns your current Windows to the left or right of the screen.
6. Windows + “+”/”-“: Pressing Windows key along with plus and minus keys from the Numpad area activates Windows Magnifier. Pressing “+” along with Windows key zooms in whereas “-” key zooms out.

4. Disable User Access Control [UAC]

Same as in Vista Windows 7 comes along with UAC which prompts you before every administrative action you do! This can be really irritating for advanced users, as we want to perform that action… So here is how we can disable UAC.

• Goto Start Menu > Control Panel > System and Security
• Click on Action Center and Expand the “Security Tab“
• Click on “Choose your UAC” Level and simply move the Bar down to stop prompting at all! Also you can set any setting at your choice.

That much for this post! On the next series of this post we shall see some readymade Registry hacks and some softwares to ease up our Windows 7 tweaking while boosting its overall performance. Also do share with us any tips and tricks you came across.