A calendar always come in handy. There are plenty of great calendar gadgets for Vista and Windows 7.

If you are using the Windows Live service, you’ll always have to log into your account to check your important dates. To avoid that you can simply install the calendar gadget for Windows 7 and do that right on your desktop.

Although this is still a alpha release the gadget is working very well and you no longer have to log into calendar.live.com manually.

You can download the calendar gadget over at Codeplex:
http://wlcalendargadget.codeplex.com

You can set a start and end date for events and also get an alarm message whenever it is needed. You can also add html text to the description and add useful links. Definitely comes in handy!

Heres a quick tutorial on how to unhide hidden folders in Windows 7..

1. Click the Start Button
2. Go to Control Panel
3. Appearance and Personalization > Folder Options
4. Click the View tab
5. Check Hidden files and folders: Show all files and folders
6. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)
7. Click apply and then OK

Your done!

Explorer.exe is a very important system file, make sure to backup your files and read the instructions carefully while following the steps..

1. Right click on explorer.exe and click on “Properties“. Go to the tab “Security“, click on “Advanced“

2. Go to the tab “Owner” and click on “Edit“

3. Assign the ownership to your administrator account by selecting your “Administrator account” and click on “Apply“

4. Click on “OK” and you will be back at the security tab of explorer.exe. There click on “Edit”

5. Select your administrator account and check the option “Full Control“. Click on “Apply“

6. Now you can rename your explorer.exe to explorer.exe_2 and copy your new explorer.exe into the Windows folder.

7. Restart your PC.

Originally posted here.

How to change the Start button in Windows 7? Its fairly simple, with a Windows 7 Resource editor you can edit the explorer.exe and change the looks of your Start button!

Since we’re going to change a system file, we’re first going to make a clone of explorer.exe, go to your Windows folder and copy the file “explorer.exe” & rename the copy to “explorer2.exe”.

Here are the steps..

1. Download the Windows 7 Resource Hacker.

Download ResourceHacker 32-bit (Vista, Windows 7, XP)
Download ResourceHacker 64-bit (Vista, Windows 7, XP)

2. Start the file “ResHacker.exe”

3. Go to: File > Open to open the explorer.exe. You will find it in your Windows folder C:\Windows

4. Uncollapse the folder “Bitmap”. We are going to change the files in folder “6801″, “6805″ and “6809″.

We need to replace every Start button .bmp file.

5. Uncollapse “6801″ and right-click on the entry “1033″ and click on “Replace Resource..”:

Shutdown timer for Windows 7 can become very handy when it gets down to scheduling your PC shut downs. When you have certain programs running and you gotta leave, scheduling your shut down is very useful and easy.

The latest version of the shutdown timer is 2.1.1, which can force your PC to shutdown even  if there are still many active applications running. By default it is enabled, to disable this feature simply go to “Preferences”. This awesome tool also allows you to minimize the shutdown timer to system tray..

The future of this program will be very functional and will have much more advanced features that will let you schedule your shut down much easier then ever before.

Originally posted here.

The latest version of Microsoft Windows, Windows 7 OS slated to be released on October 22, 2009 is designed to be more focused on incremental upgrade thereby providing full compatibility with devices and applications with which Windows Vista is already compatible.

Windows 7 includes a stream of new features like advancement in touchscreen, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, support for additional file formats, improved boot performance and kernel improvements. This explains Windows 7’s superiority over Windows XP, Windows Vista.

Windows 7 Features

Windows 7 includes a number of new features, such as advances in touch and handwriting recognition support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, Direct Access. Windows 7 has inbuilt mechanism which adds up as support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards from different vendors.