Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets Help and advice for your Windows 7 PC 06

61. Create folder favourites

If you're regularly working on the same folder in Explorer then select it in the right-hand page,
right-click Favourites on the left-hand menu, and select Add to Favourites. It'll then appear at the
bottom of the favourites list for easy one-click access later.

62. Disable hibernation

By default Windows 7 will permanently consume a chunk of your hard drive with its hibernation
file, but if you never use sleep, and always turn your PC off, then this will never actually be
used. To disable hibernation and recover a little hard drive space, launch REGEDIT, browse to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power, then set both
HibernateEnabled and HiberFileSizePerfect to zero.
The Black Box Recorder. Every developer wishes there was a way that an end-users could quickly and
simply record a repro for the problem that they’re running into that is unique to their machine.
Windows 7 comes to the rescue! Part of the in-built diagnostic tools that we use internally to send
feedback on the product, the Problem Steps Recorder provides a simple screen capture tool that
enables you to record a series of actions. Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and
captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop
recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps. It’s
a really neat little tool and I can’t wait for it to become ubiquitous on every desktop! The program is
called psr.exe; you can also search for it from Control Panel under “Record steps to reproduce a
problem”.
One More of the Same, Please. I’ve seen a few folk caught out by this one. If you’ve already got an
application open on your desktop (for example, a command prompt window), and you want to open a
second instance of the same application, you don’t have to go back to the start menu. You can simply
hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon, and it will open a new instance of the
application rather than switching to the existing application. For a keyboard-free shortcut, you can
middle-click with the third mouse button to do the same thing. (This trick assumes that your application
supports multiple running instances, naturally