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.

Looking to increase performance? You might consider this useful. The following tutorial will show you How to Disable Thumbnail Previews in Windows 7.

Note: This also works with Vista.

To make this change, click the Organize button on any folder, and choose Folder and Search Options from the menu.

Click the View tab, and then check the Always show icons, never thumbnails checkbox. Just as easy as that, your now done! Apply the changes and click OK.

Let’s be honest: If you are reading this article, then you probably think the Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista is cheesy and useless. Thankfully it’s also easy to disable.

Note: If you are running Windows 7, you can disable the sidebar there as well.

To disable the sidebar, right click on the sidebar or sidebar icon, and choose properties:

Uncheck the “Start Sidebar when Windows starts” checkbox:

Then right-click on the icon, and choose Exit to close the sidebar:

Your sidebar should now be gone, and won’t start back up with Windows anymore.

If you just can’t see the point of the desktop Gadgets included in Windows 7, or even the Sidebar gadgets in Windows Vista, you’ll be happy to know that you can easily disable them with a simple configuration change.

If you are really, really new to Windows 7, the gadgets are accessible via the desktop context menu, and can be dropped anywhere on the desktop you’d like.

Have you been looking for a way to watch your favorite viral videos from YouTube and Dailymotion from the couch? Today we take a look at an easy to use plugin which allows you to watch streaming video in Windows 7 Media Center.

The first thing we need to do is download and install the plugin called Macrotube (link below) following the defaults through the install wizard.

Install Macrotube

• Download the 32-bit version here.
• Download the 64-bit version here.

Here’s a handy trick that allows you to remove all “open with” programs.

• Open the registry (type regedit.exe in the search field and right-click on regedit.exe)
• Go to the following registry key by uncollapsing the folders:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts]

• Do not get overwhelmed, theres a lot of subfolders/keys. Uncollapse the extension that you want to modify. Let’s say you want to remove all “open with” programs of the file extensions .jpg, then you would have to uncollapse that key folder.

Example: Let’s say you want to remove all “open with” programs when you right-click a .zip file:

Uncollapse the folder “.zip” and then “OpenWithProgIds”:

In the right pane delete all registry keys with the name of the programs that you want to remove from the “open with” context menu.