Does Your Drive Not Open on Double Click

One of our readers Sandeep mailed me and asked a question. “Whenever I double click on my D drive, it does not open. It shows me a find window and i am not able to access it. I am not able to access any type of data, What can be done.”
On Further probing, I came to know that whenever he double clicks, Find window opens up, and this was no result of a Virus attack, it was just playing with the Folder Options, which resulted in this situation.
He was able to see the “Find” option as the main option in bold, and also able to open drives through right click options. When I checked it, I saw that the Registry gets edited when we do the changes as Manish did.
Here is the solution to Manish’s Problem

1. Go to Start –> Run, Type Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Drive\shell
3. In the Right pane, Change the Only value there “Default” to “None“

This Solved the issue. If you are facing this problem too, you can try this and thus get your problem solved.

Changing Extension of Multiple Files

Suppose in case you have 100 video files, that too in a different formats and you want to change it to one common format, what’s the best thing you will do?
You will go in to folder options and untick “Hide extensions for known file types” and then change the extensions one by one?
Well if this is what you are going to do then i have a much simpler way of doing it.

Here’s what you need to do.

1. Go to start –> Run –> Cmd (for Xp) or Command (for 98).
2. Now on the command prompt, go onto the folder where all these videos are, or where your data is(like “d:\videos>”).
3. Type in “ren *.* *.mpeg” without quotes. Its just an example on how to rename files. You can select any valid extension and all the files will be renamed in a very little time.

Try this and you are going to love it.

Speed Up Starting Of CD/DVD Burning Software

Whenever you Burn your data onto a CD/DVD, you might have noticed that it takes time to open the software. Either you use Nero or Roxio or any other software, it takes time to open. You can speed this process by making some changes in the services. Some of the services used by this software are not required and can be stopped. This will make the process much faster. Lets see how.

1. Go to Start –> Control Panel –> Administrative Tools –> Services.
2. Select IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service and Disable the Startup Type.
3. Click OK and Exit.

You will now see the difference. This makes the service much faster then your previous experience. However, if you are using the Windows XP CD/DVD burning service, then you might not see this service, and if you do then disabling this won’t have any effect.

Disabling Right Click on Desktop

After reading a small book on Registry, I have learned a lot. As you can see that some of my last posts have concentrated only on registry tweaks. Registry is a very powerful tool, and how it can be used in hacking and can be connected with Trojans and viruses is the major area of interest. Today, i completed this book, and i am not going to touch it again. I now need to study a bit of my MBA as well but lastly i was able to get one more tweak, which i was looking for, Disabling the right click on Desktop. Here is how you can perform it.

1. Go to Start –> Run, type Regedit.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer.
3. In the Right Panel, create a new DWORD value named “NoViewContextMenu” (Case-Sensitive), and give the value as “1“.
4. Give a reboot to your system, and it should be done.
5. To disable it, you need to change the value to “0“, or either you can delete the registry entry as well.

Hope you liked it.