windows 7 themes

If you have experienced a Windows 7 black screen of death, then you might be facing a serious problem. When this happens, all you see is a black desktop on your monitor, nothing else. It would seem that all your programs, shortcuts and files are gone but they aren’t. They are just sitting in your computer. The problem is the interface can’t load properly due to errors in your system.

What made your Windows 7 screen black are some invalid registry keys, possibly due to malware tinkering with your system files. It might also be cause by some obsolete software you have that replaced your registry entries with older versions. Before you grab that Windows 7 disc from your cabinet and reinstall, read this short guide that will help you fix black screen problems on your PC.

• Restart the computer and log on. Wait for the black screen to show up.
• Connect to the Internet. The black screen problem does not seem to affect your Web connection as far as we know, but do check if you can connect.
• Hit Ctrl, Alt and Del at the same time to bring out the Task Manager.
• Click the Application Tab and select New Task.
• Enter this command: ”C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”"http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX”  - This command will use Internet Explorer to download the fix.
• Click OK and wait for your browser to launch.
• When prompted, click on Run and the fix should automatically download and run on your computer.
• Restart to check if your PC is fixed.

If the above procedure doesn’t seem to get your computer going, try getting a registry cleaner to put your system registry back in its place. As said earlier, the problem stems from incorrect registry entries so once the cleaner files and sorts your registry and fixes all the errors, your system should be back to normal.

Now you know how to fix black screen issues in your computer. Even if you are lucky enough to have not yet experienced the dreaded Windows 7 black screen of death, better pack a registry cleaner in your system and have it scan your computer regularly to avoid getting your Windows 7 screen black.

windows 7 themes

How to Add Extra Clocks in Windows 7

Windows 7 includes an enhancement to the system clock that lets you display 2 additional clocks when you hover your mouse over the system clock.

Adding these additional clocks is extremely easy. First right-click on the clock in the system tray, and choose Adjust Date/Time:

How to Turn Off Windows Explorer Click Sounds in Windows 7.

The Windows Explorer click sounds are enough to drive you crazy after a while. You’d think that the configuration option to turn them off would be a checkbox saying “Stop Annoying Me”, but that’s just not the case.

To open up the sounds configuration panel quickly, just type in mmsys.cpl into the start menu search box, and hit enter. You could also go to the Sounds and Audio devices in Control Panel, or even type Sound into the search box.

Click the Sounds tab and then browse down in the list to “Start Navigation”

You’ll see that the dropdown box has “Windows Navigation Start.wav” selected. Change this to (None) at the top of the list. Hit OK and your annoyance is over with.

Remote Desktop is disabled by default in Windows 7 or Vista, but it’s easy enough to turn it back on. If you need to access your Vista PC from another box, it’s an essential thing to turn on.

Note: Remote desktop is only included in the Professional, Business, or Ultimate versions of Windows. Home editions do not have remote desktop. This should work for both Windows 7 and Vista.

To get to the configuration page, you can either right-click the Computer icon and choose properties, or you can type in system into the start menu search box, and then find the entry for System.

If you need a way to save some hard drive space one trick is to disable system restore in Windows 7. We like to share all options on how to take control of your operating system, so for readers living on the edge this tip is for you.

Note: Keep in mind Windows 7 is just being released and there could be bugs, crashes, etc.. and you won’t be able to restore your system if disaster strikes!

Disable System Restore

Now with all that being said.. Open Control Panel, switch to all items view and click on System. In the next window click on the System Protection link.

If you are tired of the way certain keys on your system work, such as the Caps Lock key, you can re-map them to function as a different key by using a registry hack. But there should be an easier way, right?

This is where SharpKeys comes into the picture: It’s a small utility that will let you easily map one key to another key easily, or even turn the key off, without having to enter the registry at all.

For instance, I used the key mapping to just turn off my Caps Lock key, since I never use it.

You can click the Add button to bring up the Add New Key Mapping dialog, where you can either select the keys to map from the lists, or just click the Type Key button and press the key manually (which I find much more intuitive)

Once you are done, click the Write to Registry button and you’ll be told to log off or reboot for the changes to take effect. Download SharpKeys.

Sometimes you might have a shared computer where you don’t want the users to be able to do a Shutdown or Restart. Today we take a look at using Local Group Policy Editor to remove those buttons from the Start Menu in Windows 7.

Note: This process uses Local Group Policy Editor which is not available in Starter or Home versions of Windows 7.

The caps lock key is one of those remnants of another age of computers, back when people used to shout at each other more often. Since it’s not entirely useful anymore we’ll learn how to disable it. If you aren’t interested in the explanation you can skip to the bottom for the registry files.

Windows 7 doesn’t have a default setting to allow for disabling the key, so what we have to do is re-map the key to something non-existent so as to completely disable it.

Here’s the format of the binary data, with the important parts in bold and various colors:

00000000 00000000 02000000 00003A00 00000000

Here’s how it works:

• The first 16 zeros are just there to waste space.
• The “02″ in bold represents how many keys you are going to re-map plus 1. (It really represents the length of the data, but whatever)
• The orange bolded “0000″ is the key we actually want Windows to map TO, which in this case is nothing, or 0.
• The blue bolded “3A00″ is the key we are mapping from, in this case the caps lock key.
• The next 8 zeros are there to waste space as the null terminator.

You can map between multiple keys by incrementing the “02″ and then adding another of the colorful bold blocks in the middle. The 3A00 in the mix is the scan code.  For example, if you wanted to disable the caps lock key and then change scroll lock into a caps lock key:

00000000 00000000 03000000 00003A00 3A004600 00000000

Now that you’ve learned how these things work internally, you can download and extract the zipfile which contains the following files:

Once you’ve applied one of these registry files, you’ll have to reboot your computer for it to work. To uninstall, you can use the uninstall registry tweak, or you can simply delete the Scancode Map key entirely.

Download Keyboard Mappings Registry Tweaks

This should work in any version of Windows, including XP. Originally posted by its owner here.

If you need to delete or overwrite a system file in Windows 7, you’ll quickly notice that you cannot delete system files, even as administrator. This is because Windows system files are owned by the TrustedInstaller service by default, and Windows File Protection will keep them from being overwritten.

Thankfully, there’s a way that you can get around this. You need to take ownership of the files, and then assign yourself rights to delete or modify the file. For this, we’ll use the command line.

Warning: Do not delete system files. This can damage your PC.
Note: This also works with Vista.

How to fix Chrome not having an internet connection..

Many people recently started having an issue with Google’s Chrome browser. I myself have experienced this problem. One day all of the sudden Chrome had no internet, I checked my internet connection and it was perfectly fine.

So I decided to open FireFox which had no problem surfing the web. Being frustrated over the whole situation I started doing some research and found a solution to all the Chrome fans!

Here it is:

• Open IE and on the menu: Tools -> Internet Options
• Hit the Connections tab, then hit the LAN Settings button
• UNCHECK “Use a proxy server for your LAN“, then press OK for both windows.
• Refresh the browser and both Chrome & IE should work.