Yaj Computers

So you get Windows 10. You share your media libraries so other users on your network can see and play your music from Windows Media Player on their own puters.
Unfortunately, when they try to browse your music, WMP connects but quickly declares that your media library is empty!
You double-check the sharing settings, blah blah blah…
Nothing!
What’s going on?

You’re gonna love this…
At least in the November update for Windows 10 (version 1511), you need to either create a new HomeGroup or join an existing one on your local network.
I know, I know, you’re not using a HomeGroup! You’ve got a multi-OS local environment, so you’re just using regular old “Samba” sharing.
Still, if you enable the HomeGroup nonsense, your media sharing will start working normally again.
Note that you (in Windows 10) will not have a problem playing other puters’ media via Windows Media Player. But they won’t be able see or play yours, whether they’re running Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10.
Here are the simple steps you need to follow:

1. Click Start
2. Type: homegroup
3. In the search results, click: HomeGroup
4. If it says, “You’ve been invited to join a HomeGroup”, then click the Join now button. You’ll need to get the password from whoever set up the HomeGroup on your network. Otherwise, follow the prompts to create a new HomeGroup, and set a password yourself.
5. You’re done.

Now try accessing your media library from another puter on your local network. You should be able to see your music and other files from someone else’s Windows Media Player.
Don’t ask me what’s going on here, but it works!

The Startup folder contains shortcuts to programs that run when you start up Windows.
Back in the olden days of Windows 7, you could easily find the Startup folder. All you had to do was click Start, and type “Startup”.
Wasn’t that easy?
Enter Windows 8, and now Windows 10…
Try the same trick to locate the Startup folder, and you get… nothing!
SIGH.
So, where did the Startup folder go??

You’re going to love this – really.
To find the Startup folder, the quickest way is to do the following:

1. Hold down the Windows key, and type R
2. Type: shell:startup
3. Click OK

That will show you the following folder, which is the Startup folder where some of your startup programs are launched automagically:

This folder is where you add or remove shortcuts to programs to make them run (or not run) at startup.
Note the path to the Startup folder. Kind of a pain to remember, right?
There are two easy ways to “bookmark” this folder.
The first is to use the Pin to Quick Access button:

Ta-DA!
Now you have a Quick Access link to the Startup folder.
If you’d rather have a link on the Start Menu, first you need to go up one folder level. You can do this either by clicking on “Programs” in the address bar, or by clicking the up arrow to the left of the address bar.
Then, right-click the Startup folder, and choose Pin to Start:

This will give you a lovely tile on your Start Menu, like so:

That was easy.
Note also that there is actually a second Startup folder. The Startup folder above is for your user account only.
The second Startup folder is for programs that run at startup for all users on the puter. To find that Startup folder, we have to modify our Win-R trick slightly:

This will display the “All Users” Startup folder, which is in a totally different location.

The same Quick Access and Start Menu tricks mentioned above apply to the All Users Startup folder.
That’s all there is to it.
If the program you’re seeing at startup isn’t in either of the Startup folders, try uninstalling the program itself. Many programs run when Windows starts, but they are launched via other more complicated methods.
In any case, now you know the Top Secret shell commands to make the Startup folders appear.
Just don’t ask me why Microsoft thought it was a good idea to make them so hard to find!

One of the most common problems I’ve seen is missing or “disappeared” network icons in Windows 7.
This problem can take a few different forms.
For example, you may be able to connect to the internet just fine, but your ethernet/WiFi icon in the system tray always claims you are disconnected.
Or, you open up the Network and Sharing Center, click the “Change adapter settings” link, and no network adapters show up – it’s just blank.
But in both cases, everything still works!
There is one fix I have found that actually works, time and time again…

To start with, let’s go over the symptoms real quick just for clarity’s sake. The first problem is the Constantly Disconnected Network icon in the system tray. In short, you see this all the time:

Okay, so this one is lots of fun! No matter what you do, it always shows you are disconnected… but everything works!
The second problem looks like this:
In this case, you go to Network and Sharing Center and then click Change adapter settings which opens the Network Connections dialog.
Instead of seeing your ethernet or WiFi adapters, you see nothing. This makes it kind of hard to change any settings…
In many cases, both problems will occur at the same time.
So, how to fix it? Piece of cake!

1. Click Start
2. Type: regedt32
3. Press enter
4. Using the left pane, navigate to:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network
5. Once in the above folder, right-click on Config and choose Delete
6. Close Registry Editor
7. Reboot!!

A view of the key you need to delete in Registry Editor:

Note that if you just open the Network Connections screen again, or look at your system tray icon, it will appear that things still aren’t working. Most of the time, you must reboot for the changes to take effect.
Once you do, your system tray network icon will be fine again, and your Network Connections will once again look something like this:
And that’s it.
I will note that many people recommend completely uninstalling and re-installing your ethernet and Wifi drivers… You can try, but that has never worked for me on any computer that had this problem.
But, the above fix works like a charm!

If you speak more than one language, then you probably also write in more than one language.
In that case, you’re probably using Windows’ Language Bar.
In Windows 10, it appears in the system tray (lower-right corner of the taskbar by the time and date) as a 3-letter abbreviation, such as: ENG
There is a common problem that’s been around for awhile, and it’s back with a vengeance in Windows 10: Windows automatically applies some updates, and after your puter reboots, POOF!
No more Language Bar!
How do you get your Language Bar back? Read on!

Now, the actual solution for this problem involves a bit of Registry hacking. So, before we go there, let’s make sure your Language Bar settings haven’t been screwed up.

Check your Language Bar settings

First, click Start and type: language
Then click on: Language (Control Panel)

On the Control Panel window that pops up, click Advanced settings:

On the next screen, you’ll need to do 2 things.
First, make sure that Use the desktop language bar when it’s available is CHECKED.

Second, click the Options link on the right:

Make sure that either Floating on Desktop or Docked in the taskbar is selected. Click OK, and then click Save back in the Advanced settings window.
If you still don’t see the Language Bar, carry on!

Hack your registry to restore the Language Bar

Don’t worry, this really isn’t that difficult or dangerous!
First, click Start and type: regedit
Click the regedit search result to run the Registry Editor.
In the left pane, you need to navigate to:
So far, so good!
In the right-hand pane, Right-click in the empty white space somewhere and choose New -> String Value:

You should have a new value appear called: New Value #1
Right-click this new value, and choose Modify…

In the little box that pops up, paste in the following text for the Value data field:

Click OK, close the Registry Editor, and reboot!
Your Language Bar should re-appear now in the system tray.

There are many things to love about Windows 7. It truly is “Vista done right”, sad as that may be. But it ain’t perfect.
One of the most common problems, as I recently discovered, is that you tell Win 7 to share only your Public directories, but it doesn’t quite listen. Due to some apparent bug that is at least present in the Release Candidate build of Win 7, sometimes the OS will share your entire Users directory, which includes your Public files/folders. That means ALL your files are shown to the whole world on your LAN – not just the your public folders.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix this little problem once you know a few little bits of information…

I know, I know – you shouldn’t have to dig into the guts of file sharing and permissions. It should “just work”. Well, don’t feel bad. Try sharing some directories with the whole world on a Mac or Linux box without a password, and you will quickly find yourself delving into the horrors of Samba config files. At least Win 7 doesn’t make you do that sort of frustrating crapola. Count your blessings.
Anyhow, here’s how Windows 7 shares stuff: There is a Users directory, typically C:\Users. Under this Users directory is the directory for your user account, which we’ll say is C:\Users\Scottie. Then there is also another subfolder for publicly-shared directories: C:\Users\Public. Pretty easy, right?
Normally, yes. But sometimes, when you use the Win 7 GUI – the “Network and Sharing Center” – your C:\Users\Public folder is shared, AND your entire C:\Users\Scottie folder (“Scottie” will be different in your case) will also be shared, much to your dismay. Nevertheless, Windows will still tell you via the GUI that only your Public folders are shared. Oops.
You might think that you can simply right-click the Users folder, look at the Sharing tab, and just sort things out quickly and easily. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite so simple. In Windows 7, file sharing depends on two things: the file sharing settings, and the folder’s permissions.
So, if you want to keep your Public shared, but hide the files under your personal Users directory, here’s how to do it…
Step 1 is to hide the entire C:\Users directory:

1. Open Explorer and right-click on the C:\Users folder and select Properties.
2. Click the Sharing tab, and then click the Advanced Sharing button (NOT the “Share…” button!!)
3. Click the Permissions button, select “Everyone”, and then clear the checkboxes for “Full Control”, “Change”, and “Read”.
4. Click OK, and then clear the “Share this folder” check box in the Advanced Sharing window.
5. Click OK, and then close the Properties window

At this point, you will have successfully unshared the entire Users directory, including the Public dir and all its subdirectories. You can verify this by connecting to your computer from another machine on the LAN.
Okeydokey. Now, if you want to make your Public dir show up again, just do the following:

1. Open Explorer and go to C:\Users.
2. Right-click on the Public folder and select Properties.
3. Click the Sharing tab, and then click the Advanced Sharing button (again, NOT the “Share…” button!)
4. Click “Share this folder” and give it a Share Name of “Public”
5. Click the Permissions button, select “Everyone”, and then make sure to check the boxes for “Full Control”, “Change”, and “Read”. If you only want people to be able to read the files in your Public dirs, just check “Read”.
6. Click OK, OK, and the close the Properties window.

You’re done! Note that when you share/unshare folders, you’ll probably have to wait a moment or two while the permissions on all the files and folders are changed. In any case, you can now go once again to another computer on your local network and verify that only your Public folder is shared.
This little trick is also useful if you’d like to set up file sharing the way it worked in Vista. In Vista, when only your public was shared, it would show up on the network as: \\Scottie\Public
In Windows 7, Microsoft for some reason decided it would be more fun to confuse everyone by changing the network path to: \\Scottie\Users\Public
Because, ya know, confusing changes like that always help everyone!
But, no worries – you can now make 7 work like Vista, and anyone on your LAN with your drives mapped will actually see your files again instead of an error when you upgrade from Vista to 7.

Have fun!

This is one of those Windows tricks that you probably didn’t even know existed.
Usually, the Explorer icon is visible on the Taskbar.
That’s great for opening Explorer and navigating to whatever folder you need.
But what if you want to maintain a list of commonly-used folders without clogging up your desktop with a bunch of shortcuts?
It turns out there’s a quick and easy solution for this very problem.

Now, you should have Explorer on your taskbar, like so:

If you don’t have it there, adding the Explorer icon to the taskbar is pretty easy: Just drag any folder onto the taskbar.
POOF! You’ve got Explorer on your taskbar now.
One little problem: No matter what folder you drag onto the taskbar, Windows will always turn it into a shortcut to Explorer itself – not to the folder you dragged onto the taskbar.
So, here’s the trick.
Once you’ve got Explorer on the taskbar, drag any other folder you’d like to have a link to onto the taskbar. Before you let go of the mouse button, you’ll notice a little “tooltip” appears that says: Pin to Explorer
Let go, and up will pop the Explorer Jumplist. You’ll notice that your new folder is listed at the top of the jumplist as “Pinned”.
Now, if you want to open Explorer, click the Explorer icon as usual.
But, if you want to open one of your pinned folders, right-click the Explorer icon on the taskbar, et voila!
Your pinned folders appear, like so:

Okay, but what if you want to remove a pinned folder? Piece of cake.
Right-click Explorer on the taskbar, and then hover your mouse over the Pinned folder you’d like to remove. You’ll see a pushpin, and if you click it, it will “unpin”  the folder from the Explorer jumplist.

You can pin a bunch of folders to Explorer on the taskbar, free up desktop space, and your favorite folders will always be 2 simple clicks away.
When you think about it, this is pretty nice. If the folders were on your desktop, you’d have to double-click to open them anyway. Double-clicking is obviously quicker than right-click + normal click, but still… Fewer shortcuts on the desktop is never a bad thing!
Finally, now that you know about Jumplists, try right-clicking the other programs on your taskbar. Most programs have all kinds of handy things in their jumplists.
For example, try right-clicking your Firefox or Chrome icon on the taskbar. BOOYAH! Quick access, and less clicking…

Enjoy!

Let’s say you’ve got Windows 7, and you install a second hard drive. Perhaps you have an SSD as your primary drive, and you want to store your GB’s of MP3s, videos, and documents on your second data drive.
Well, you could just copy the data into a new folder the old fashioned way. Doing this tends to break Windows 7’s “libraries” feature, and suddenly you have to tell Windows where to find all your files. That’s kind of annoying.
Fortunately, there is a built-in feature for moving your My Documents, My Music, My Videos, My Pictures, and even your Downloads folder automagically – and Windows will still keep track of everything for you!
Here’s how you do it:

1. Open Explorer (Win-E if you like keyboard shortcuts)
2. Find your way to C:\Users\[YOUR ACCOUNT NAME]
3. Right click on the folder you want to move (such as “My Music”) and choose Properties
4. Select the Location tab
5. Click the Move button
6. Select a new location for your goodies. You can put the folder anywhere, and even create new folders and subfolders on any drive to store your loot
7. Click Yes when prompted about whether or not you want to actually move all the files over to the new location

That’s it! You can repeat the process for the rest of your “My” folders. Windows apps like Media Player will still know where to find your music and other files.
So, that’s great. But what if, say, you have a custom folder with a bunch of huge files on your C:, and you want to move those to your secondary drive as well?
Maybe you have a folder C:\Junk, and you’ve stored a bunch of files that some of your applications now expect to live in C:\Junk – but you’d rather have them off your boot drive and store them instead on your secondary drive. If you just move the folder to your second hard drive, all those apps will complain.
Enter mklink.
mklink is a seriously handy command line utility in Windows 7 and Vista that let’s you make your own fancy “virtual folders”, otherwise known as “symbolic links” and “hard links”  in Linux Land.
To move a folder C:\Junk onto E:\Junk and have your apps still believe that the actual contents in Junk still reside at C:\Junk, do this:

1. Move your Junk folder onto E: the old fashioned way
2. Click Start and type cmd (but don’t press enter)
3. Right click on cmd.exe in the Start Menu and choose Run as administrator
4. In the command prompt window, type: mklink /h /j c:\Junk e:\Junk

(For details of what the command is doing, just type help mklink in a command prompt window.)
Voila! Now you have a C:\Junk and an E:\Junk. The only difference is that your files actually live in E:\Junk, but C:\Junk is hardlinked to E:\Junk. So, if an application tries to access C:\Junk, it is fooled into reading the contents of E:\Junk, even though it still calls the directory “C:\Junk”.

Handy, yes?

At some point, you’ll probably run into a problem that doesn’t seem to have an easy solution: one of your default User folders in Windows 7 (My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, Downloads, and Desktop) will suddenly disappear.
Try as you might, you won’t be able to restore these user folders, because they are actually “special”. Windows treats them differently than a normal folder you might create yourself, and they even have pretty icons, like so:

There is a lot of info out there on how to fix these built-in Windows 7 folders, but it’s all rather complicated.
So, here’s the boiled-down, anybody-can-do-it version on how to restore your missing User folders – or so I hope!

First, a few bits of info you’ll need to keep in mind. The default locations for the User folders in Windows 7 are:

• C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Downloads
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Music
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Videos

Just replace USERNAME with your Windows account login, which in my case is “Scottie”. So, my Desktop folder is:

• C:\Users\Scottie\Desktop

These are the actual names of the folders as stored on your hard drive, but since we’re talking about special User folders, they are magically turned into “My ___” folders with the special icon.
So, that’s that. Next, we’re gonna repair your folders. The process will go like this:

1. Create/rename the User folders
2. Edit the Registry to reset The Magic
3. Run some command-prompt stuff to finish The Magic
4. Reboot

Don’t worry, it’s all very simple!

Create/Rename the User Folders

So, open Explorer (Win-E, or double-click the Computer icon) and navigate to: C:\Users\USERNAME
Here, you’re going to need to decide which folder(s) are screwed up.
Even though the PATH to the User folder doesn’t contain the word “My”, the version you see in Explorer should look like so:

• Desktop
• My Documents
• Downloads
• My Music
• My Pictures
• My Videos

Note that “Desktop” and “Downloads” do NOT have “My” in front of them in Explorer, but they DO have Magic Folder Icons, which look like so:

If a “magic folder” icon is not there, and it just looks like a regular folder icon, you just need to check the folder name and change it if necessary. If a folder is completely missing, you’ll need to create a new one. Again, the following is the list of folders you may need to create/rename:

• C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Downloads
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Music
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures
• C:\Users\USERNAME\Videos

For example,  if you see “My Documents” and it’s a magic icon, you do not need to do anything.
If you see a normal yellow folder called “Documents”, do nothing.
If there is no “My Documents” or “Documents”, then create a new folder C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents.
There are two steps here:

1. Check for the Magic Folder Icon
2. Check that non-Magic Folders have the proper name, which prepares us for the next step

Maybe only your Downloads folder is screwed up, and all the other folders are okay (Desktop, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos). In that case, make sure there is a folder “Downloads”. If there is, go to the next step. If there isn’t, create it first.

Reset the Registry User Folder Settings

This part might seem scary, but it’s really easy.

1. Click Start
2. Type: regedt32
3. Click the program regedt32.exe to run the Registry Editor
4. In the left pane, navigate to:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

You should see this:
I’ve highlighted the fields you’ll need to look at. You can see that there is one entry for Downloads, one for Desktop, one for My Music, etc. For each folder you need to fix, you’ll want to do 2 things:

1. Make sure the Name field is correct (far left, in pink)
2. Make sure the Data field is correct (far right, in pink)

Now, in Windows 7, the path C:\Users\USERNAME\ is often written as %USERPROFILE% internally in Windows. This is just a variable that points to your Users directory. Simple, yes? It’s also quite handy.
So, in the Registry Editor, make sure you’re using the default values, like so (Name –> Data):

• {374DE290-123F-4565-9164-39C4925E467B}  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Downloads
  
• Desktop  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Desktop
• My Music  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Music
• My Pictures  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Pictures
• My Video  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Videos
• Personal  –>  %USERPROFILE%\Documents
  

Don’t ask me why the Name for Downloads is that wonky string, or why the Name for Documents is “Personal”… It’s Microsoft.
To correct the Name field, right-click the Name and select “Rename”:

To change the Data field (the folder path), double-click the name field, and enter the new path from the list above:

In my example, I don’t want My Documents pointing to E:\Users\Scottie\Documents, because I don’t have E: any more! Oops.
First, I made C:\Users\Scottie\Documents in the steps above.
Now in the Registry Editor, I would not change the Name of “Personal”, since that’s okay according to the list above. But I would double-click it, and change the Data to %USERPROFILE%\Documents
Do the same for any other User folders you need to fix. When you’re done editing, just close the Registry Editor (it saves automatically).

Last crazy step

Now you’re going to complete The Magic. Do this:

1. Click Start
2. Type: cmd
3. Right-click cmd.exe and choose Run as administrator
4. For each folder you need to fix or recreate, run the following command(s):

• Downloads:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Downloads /S /D
• Desktop:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Desktop /S /D
• My Documents:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Documents /S /D
• My Music:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Music /S /D
• My Pictures:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Pictures /S /D
• My Videos:
  attrib +r -s -h %USERPROFILE%\Videos /S /D

Highlight each “attrib” command you need above, and copy it (Ctrl-C, or right-click and pick Copy). Then, in the Command Prompt window, click the C:\ icon in the upper-left corner and choose Edit -> Paste:

Less typing = good!

Reboot

That’s it. You’ve made sure your missing folder(s) exist, you’ve done some Registry hacking to reset the Magic Folders, and you’ve set the proper attributes on your new folders.
All that’s left is to reboot! When you log back in, you should see your User folders restored to mint, magical condition.

Final Notes

Hopefully, this has been fairly easy to follow. For other User folders (Contacts) or for Windows 8, check out Seven Forums tutorial on this very topic.

I found their explanation rather difficult to follow, but it does have more information – and even some .REG files you can download and run to avoid doing any registry editing yourself. Check it out!

This tutorial will help you in finding which services are unnecessary in Windows 10 and you'll be able to set them to manual start so that those services don't start with Windows and don't take your valuable system resources. 

STEP 1:

First of all we'll need to open Services Manager to configure Windows 10 services. You can open Services Manager using several ways as given following:

1.a. Press WIN+X keys together to show quick access menu and then select "Computer Management" option. It'll open a new window. Now click on "Services and Applications -> Services" in left-side pane.

1.b. Same thing can be done by clicking on "Computer -> Manage" in "This PC" ribbon toolbar.

1.c. You can also right-click on "This PC" icon on Desktop and select "Manage" option.

1.d. Or press WIN+R keys together to launch RUN dialog box and type services.msc and press Enter. It'll directly open Services Manager.

STEP 2:

Now we'll configure Windows 10 services in Services Manager program. Services Manager shows a huge list of all Windows services along with their status and startup type.

The Status section shows whether a service is currently running in background or not. Startup Type section tells you whether a service is set to automatically start with Windows or not.

We'll set some unnecessary services startup type to MANUAL so that they don't start automatically with Windows and thus don't consume system resources.

Following are some services which can be safely set to MANUAL:

• Connected User Experiences and Telemetry
• Diagnostic Policy Service
• Diagnostic Tracking Service
• Distributed Link Tracking Client (If your computer is not connected to any network)
• dmwappushsvc (To turn off Telemetry and Data Collection)
• Downloaded Maps Manager (If you don't use Maps app)
• IP Helper (If you don't use IPv6 connection)
• Program Compatibility Assistant Service
• Print Spooler (If you don't have a printer)
• Remote Registry (You can set it to DISABLED for Security purposes)
• Secondary Logon
• Security Center
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper (If you are not in a workgroup network)
• Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service (If you don't want to use touch keyboard and handwriting features)
• Windows Defender Service (If you don't use Windows Defender program)
• Windows Error Reporting Service
• Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) (If you don't have a scanner)
• Windows Search (If you don't use Windows Search feature frequently)

Apart from the above mentioned services, You can also set a few other services startup type to MANUAL such as services installed by your graphics card driver (Intel, nVidia, AMD, etc), your sound card driver (Realtek, Creative, etc).

STEP 3:
That's it. After configuring services startup type, close Services Manager and restart your computer to take effect.

After reboot, you'll notice a lot of improvement in your Windows 10 computer performance. By any chance if you face any issue with any software program, you can restore the services startup type to Automatic again using Services Manager to fix the issue.

Happy Tweaking