Changing User Permissions for an Entire Drive

In Windows, every disk drive has an associated security profile which determines who is allowed access to the drive and what kind of access (e.g., read or write) a user is entitled to. If you are an administrator or have Control access to the drive, you can change the drive's permissions, thereby allowing or denying certain types of access.

To see a drive's permissions, click the Start menu button and then Computer. This displays all the drives accessible through your system. Right-click on the drive whose permissions you want to change and choose Properties. In the resulting dialog box make sure the Security tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Permissions associated with drive E:.

This particular screen shot shows that user "Jim Olin" has three permissions for the drive: Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read. To deny that user access, click the Edit button and again select user Jim Olin. Windows presents a dialog box that allows you to specify permissions for the user. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Editing permissions of drive E: for user Jim Olin.

Now click the Deny checkboxes that are beside the three checked boxes and OK out of the Properties dialog boxes. Now, when user Jim Olin attempts to access the "E:" drive he gets an error message and is prevented from accessing the drive.

Adding a Tile to the Start Screen

The Start screen is what you see when you first log into Windows. It is the place where your tiles are displayed and you can quickly start the apps associated with those tiles. Since the Start screen acts as a sort of "dashboard" for your most commonly performed Windows tasks, it makes sense that at some point you'll want to modify the tiles visible on the screen.

Adding a tile to the Start screen is a natural thing to do. In fact, you should give some thought to which programs you use most often and then add tiles for each of those programs to the Start screen. (That way you can start using those programs quickly and easily.)

To add a tile for a program, begin with the Start screen visible. Start typing the name of the program you want to appear there. For instance, if you want the Calculator app to appear on the Start screen, just start typing "Calculator," without the quote marks. As you start to type, Windows assumes you want to search for the item and immediately complies with your request. You'll see the search results on the screen, meaning you'll see the apps that match what you type.

Once the app is visible on the screen, select it by using one of the following methods:

• If using a mouse, right-click on the app.
• If using a touch screen, perform a short, downward swipe on the app.
• If using a keyboard, use the arrow keys to navigate to the app and then press the spacebar.

With the app successfully selected, you should not that a number of options appear near the bottom-left of the screen.

To have the app appear on your Start screen, choose the Pin to Start option. A tile for the app is immediately added to the Start screen.

If you prefer to do most of your work from the Desktop, you can also add tiles for some of the items that appear there. The easiest way to figure out what you can add a Start screen tile for is to display the icon for the item in the Desktop and then right-click it. (For instance, you might right-click the Recycle Bin or a program shortcut.) You can then choose Pin to Start from the resulting Context menu.

What you cannot add Start screen tiles for is document files. In other words, if you've got a bunch of Excel workbooks or Word documents on the Desktop, right-clicking on those does no good; you cannot create Start screen tiles for them.

Like us on Facebook

Stopping Windows from Creating Thumbs.db Files

The Thumbs.db files is a system (typically, hidden) file that gets created in order to speed up the viewing of graphic thumbnails in a folder. Its existence sometimes poses some problems, though, so many users would just as soon not have the files created at all. To stop Windows from creating Thumbs.db files, click the Start button, type "gpedit.msc" (without the quotes), and press Enter. Windows displays the Local Group Policy Editor. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Local Group Policy Editor.

In the left pane, navigate to User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Explorer. Once there the screen displays a number of different configuration settings for the computer. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Turning off Thumbs.db.

Double-click the item on the right which says "Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files." You are then presented with a screen dedicated to the changing of this policy. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Changing the Thumbs.db policy.

Note, although it may seem backward, you are enabling the turning off of Thumbs.db, so be sure and click the Enabled radio button. OK your way out, and you won't have to bother with Thumbs.db files any more. (You may need to delete existing Thumbs.db files, but Windows won't create any new ones or make changes to any existing ones.)

Like us on Facebook

Renaming Files Using the Command Line

If you don't mind doing a little more typing and a little less mouse clicking, you can perform a lot of actions from the command line. (Displaying the Command Prompt Window is covered under another tip.) One thing you can do from the command line is rename files. The command-line rename command is REN (or RENAME) and it takes two parameters. The first parameter specifies the file that is to be renamed, and the second parameter specifies what its new name should be.

Let's say you have a file called "C:\Temp\OldFile.txt" and you want to rename it to be "NewFile.txt". You would type the following at the command line:

C:\> REN C:\Temp\OldFile.txt NewFile.txt

Note the fact that the second parameter to the REN command does not include any path information but the first one does. This means you cannot rename a file to a different device or directory.

You can also rename multiple files at once by using the wildcard characters "?" and "*". The "?" character stands for exactly one actual character in the file name; the "*" character stands for one or more actual characters in the file name. So, for example, you can easily rename all of the .tmp files in a given directory to instead be .txt files:

C:\> REN *.tmp *.txt

You can use the "?" to be more specific and/or rename only a part of the file name. Let's say you have several files in a folder and some are named like "file01.tmp", "file02.tmp", "file03.tmp", etc. You just want to rename the "file??.tmp" files to have a ".txt" extension. One way to do this is like this:

C:\> REN file??.tmp file*.txt

You can even rename part of the name piece (regardless of extension) with a little creativity. So if the files to be renamed are like "file01.txt" and "file02.txt" the following command will rename them to "file71.txt", "file72.txt":

C:\> REN file??.tmp file7?.txt

Finally, you can use REN to remove pieces of a file name. Say that you have files named "Jan-numbers.xlsx", "Feb-numbers.xlsx", thru "Dec-numbers.xlsx". You can rename these files to remove the "-numbers" part of the name like so:

C:\> REN ???-numbers.xlsx ???.xlsx

The rename command, especially with wildcards, can be a great timesaver if you're careful with your parameters. Personally, if I want to do anything more sophisticated than the examples presented here I use one of the free file-renamer tools available from various download sites.

Like us on Facebook

Editing File Properties

Every file stored on your hard drive has associated with it a set of properties. These file properties indicate characteristics of the file, such as whether it is read-only hidden. The file properties can also provide information about the file, such as how much disk space it uses and what program it is opened with.

In order to change those file properties you are allowed to change (some, such as file size, cannot be changed directly) you need to display the Properties dialog box for the file. The normal way is to simply right-click on the file and choose Properties from the resulting Context menu. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Properties dialog box for a file.

The number of tabs and properties displayed in the dialog box will differ for different types of files. You can

You can modify some properties displayed in the dialog box while others are for your information only. Making changes to properties can affect how the file is treated by Windows or by other programs. For instance, some searching programs allow you to search based upon information stored in a file's properties.

Creating and Using Compressed Folders

Windows has the ability to automatically deal with compressed files and folders. The idea of using compression is to reduce the size of files, thereby freeing up disk space. Though there is a slight performance degradation when compressing and uncompressing files, if you're low on disk space and can free up a lot of it, compression is a useful strategy.

You can create a compressed folder through Windows Explorer. Navigate to the place where you want to create your compressed folder, right-click an empty area in Explorer's right pane, and select New | Compressed (zipped) Folderfrom the resulting Context menu. (See 

Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Creating a compressed folder.

This creates the compressed folder with the default name selected. Begin typing the name you want to assign to the folder and press Enter. Now you can copy or move files into that folder, and Windows will automatically compress whatever you put in there. (Obviously, if your goal is to free up disk space you'll want to move large files into the compressed folder as opposed to copying files.) Naturally, if you move a file out of a compressed folder, Windows will automatically uncompress the file when it is put in its new location.

If you have a group of files that you want to place into a new compressed folder, a great way to do it is to select all the files in Explorer, then right click on those files. One of the options is Send To, and you can select Compressed (zipped) Folder from the available options. The result is that Explorer creates a new compressed folder that uses the same root name as the file on which you right-clicked.

One thing to note about files in a compressed folder. What you can do with these files is somewhat limited. For example, you can't do an edit, open with, or rename on these file while they're in the folder. Moving files to compressed folders is in that regard akin to having a compressed online archive.

Creating a Bootable USB Flash Drive

There may come a time when you want to boot your Windows system from a USB flash drive. You obviously must first have created a bootable drive prior to trying to use it. This tip tells you how to create a bootable USB flash drive. Although there is software on the Internet to help you with this process, this tip shows how to create a bootable USB drive using native Windows commands.

First, plug in your USB drive. Note: Your flash drive must have at least 4 GB of free space and it will be formatted to NTFS. So either use a new drive or backup your data before creating this bootable USB. Otherwise you will lose all your data.

Next, get to a command prompt window and type "diskpart" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Once in the DiskPart utility, type "list disk" (again, without the quotes) and press Enter. DiskPart will list the disks it detects. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. DiskPart's listing of the available disks.

I know by looking down the "Size" column that my USB disk is Disk 2. (If you're not sure, unplug your USB disk, and do another "list disk" to see which disk disappeared. Then plug it back in, do a third "list disk", and note the disk number of your USB disk.)

Going with Disk 2 as my USB disk, I enter the following lines in the DiskPart utility, ending each line by pressing theEnter key. (Also, on the first line you should change "2" to whatever disk is appropriate on your system.)

DISKPART> select disk 2
DISKPART> clean

 partition primary
DISKPART> selec
DISKPART> creat
et partition 1
DISKPART> active

DISKPART> assign
DISKPART> exit

DISKPART> format fs=NTFS  QUICK

As you enter each command, DiskPart displays a status message to keep you informed as to what it is doing. When these steps are done you should be out of the DiskPart utility and back to the command prompt. You now have a USB drive that is formatted using the NTFS file system and is therefore ready to be made bootable. To accomplish this, follow these steps:

1. Insert your Windows 7 Installation DVD into the drive. (Step 2 assumes that drive D holds your DVD.)
2. Using the command prompt window, change your device and directory to the DVD's boot directory wherebootsect resides. For example:

        C:\> cd /d  d:\boot

3. Assuming that your USB drive has been labeled disk F by the operating system, type the following at the prompt:

        D:\Boot> bootsect /nt60 f:

4. Use Windows Explorer to copy all of the files on your Windows 7 Installation DVD to the formatted USB drive.
You now have a bootable USB drive. When you want to boot from it, plug it in, reboot Windows, and when it is starting interrupt it to specify that you want to boot from the USB. (Changing the BIOS to change boot-device order is beyond the scope of this tip.)
It is possible that you'll get an "access denied" error after performing step 3. If you do, it simply means that you need to open a command window using the administrator's rights. To do so, click the Start button and type "cmd" followed by Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Then you should be able to perform steps 2 through 4 with no problems.
Like us on Facebook