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File this one under “why didn’t I think of that.” Blogger and software engineer Abhishek Bhatnagar has posted a simple, clever way to pin multiple folders to your Windows 7 taskbar (or Superbar). Yes, you can already pin as many as you want to the Explorer icon, but it’s still nice to be able to have single-click access to your most-used folders.

Abhishek’s exact directions didn’t work for me, so here’s how I did it.

The first step is to make sure you have the hide extensions for known file types option unchecked. Click the windows button and type folder into the search box, the click folder options when it appears (it’s also in Control Panel). You can also open the run box and paste this command: rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Options_RunDLL 0

Click the view tab and you should find the hide option at the bottom of the Advanced Settings pane. Uncheck it and click ok.

Now right-click on your desktop and choose new, then choose text document. Name it whatever you like, but end with .exe (e.g. Screencaps.exe). This is the first part of the trick which fools Windows into letting you pin multiple folders.

Next, right click your freshly-renamed file and choose pin to taskbar. Once your icon appears there, hold down the shift key on your keyboard, right click the icon, and choose properties. A regular right-click may not give you the properties option– it might only display the name you entered and unpin from taskbar.

Once the properties screen is displayed, change the target to the full path to your folder — mine is going to point to C:\Users\Lee\My Pictures\Screencaps. I also changed the start in field to the same path. After you’ve changed the target, it’s OK to delete the file you created from your desktop.

All that’s left is to pick a better icon than the default Windows .EXE. Click the change icon button and pick something from imageres.dll (Windows will probably open that by default).

You can find more icons in %SystemRoot%\System32\Shell32.dll and %SystemRoot\System32\DDORes.dll (hardware icons) — or you can always download something from your favorite icon site if you want. Your icon may not change instantly. If it doesn’t, simply right-click your taskbar, choose task manager, click processes, and end the explorer.exe process. When it restarts, your new icon should appear. You can also log off and log back in if task manager isn’t something you like to mess with.

Repeat as many times as you like until you’ve got all the folders you want on your taskbar. Nice!

Go to Source Article at Download Squad

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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.

Install Macrotube

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

After it’s installed, open Windows 7 Media Center and you’ll find Macrotube in the main menu.

Currently there are three services available…YouTube, Dailymotion, and MSN Soapbox. Just select the service where you want to check out some videos.

You can browse through different subjects or categories…

Or you can search the the service by typing in what you’re looking for…with your remote or keyboard.

There is the ability to drill down you search content by date, rating, views, and relevance.

There are a few settings available such as the language beta, auto updates, and appearance.

Now just kick back and browse through the different services and watch what you want from the comfort of your couch or on your computer.

Conclusion

This neat project is still in development and the developer is continuing to add changes through updates. It only works with Windows 7 Media Player, but there is a 32 & 64-bit version. Sometimes we experiences certain videos that wouldn’t play and it did crash a few times, but that is to be expected with a work in progress. But overall, this is a cool plugin that will allow you to watch your favorite online content from WMC.

Download Macrotube and get more details and troubleshooting help fro the GreenButton forum

Go to Source Article at How to Geek

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The problem with most system monitoring apps is that they get covered up with all of your open windows, but you can solve that problem by adding monitoring apps to the Taskbar.

Setting Up & Using SuperbarMonitor

All of the individual monitors and the .dll files necessary to run them come in a single zip file for your convenience. Simply unzip the contents, add them to an appropriate “Program Files Folder”, and create shortcuts for the monitors that you would like to use on your system.

For our example we created shortcuts for all five monitors and set the shortcuts up in their own “Start Menu Folder”.

You can see what the five monitors (Battery, CPU, Disk, Memory, & Volume) look like when running…they are visual in appearance without text to clutter up the looks. The monitors use colors (red, green, & yellow) to indicate the amount of resources being used for a particular category.

Note: Our system is desktop-based but the “Battery Monitor” was shown for the purposes of demonstration…thus the red color seen here.

Hovering the mouse over the “Battery, CPU, Disk, & Memory Monitors” on our system displayed a small blank thumbnail.

Note: The “Battery Monitor” may or may not display more when used on your laptop.

Going one step further and hovering the mouse over the thumbnails displayed a small blank window. There really is nothing that you will need to worry with outside of watching the color for each individual monitor. Nice and simple!

The one monitor with extra features on the thumbnail was the “Volume Monitor”. You can turn the volume down, up, on, or off from here…definitely useful if you have been wanting to hide the “Volume Icon” in the “System Tray”.

You can also pin the monitors to your “Taskbar” if desired. Keep in mind that if you do close any of the monitors they will “temporarily” disappear from the “Taskbar” until the next time they are started.

Note: If you want the monitors to start with your system each time you will need to add the appropriate shortcuts to the “Startup Sub-menu” in your “Start Menu”.

Conclusion

If you have been wanting a nice visual way to monitor your system’s resources then SuperbarMonitor is definitely worth trying out.

Links

Download SuperbarMonitor

Go to Source Article at How to Geek
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An annoyance for music lovers who enjoy FLAC format, is there’s no native support for WMP or WMC. If you’re a music enthusiast who prefers FLAC format, we’ll look at adding support to Windows 7 Media Center and Player.

For the following article we are using Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit edition.

Download and Install madFLAC v1.8

The first thing we need to do is download and install the madFLAC v1.8 decoder (link below). Just unzip the file and run install.bat…

You’ll get a message that it has been successfully registered, click Ok.

To verify everything is working, open up one of your FLAC files with WMP, and you’ll get the following message. Check the box Don’t ask me again for this extension and click Yes.

Now Media Player should play the track you’ve chosen.

Delete Current Music Library

But what if you want to add your entire collection of FLAC files to the Library? If you already have it set up as your default music player, unfortunately we need to remove the current library and delete the database. The best way to manage the music library in Windows 7 is via WMP 12.

Since we don’t want to delete songs from the computer we need to Open WMP, press “Alt+T” and navigate to Tools \ Options \ Library.

Now uncheck the box Delete files from computer when deleted from library and click Ok.

Now in your Library click “Ctrl + A” to highlight all of the songs in the Library, then hit the “Delete” key. If you have a lot of songs in your library (like on our system) you’ll see the following dialog box while it collects all of the information.

After all of the data is collected, make sure the radio button next to Delete from library only is marked and click Ok.

Again you’ll see the Working progress window while the songs are deleted.

Deleting Current Database

Now we need to make sure we’re starting out fresh. Close out of Media Player.

Click on Start and type in services.msc into the search box and hit Enter.

Now scroll down and stop the service named Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service.

Now, navigate to the following directory and the main file to delete CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb

%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\

Again, the main file to delete is CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb, though if you want, you can delete them all. If you’re uneasy about deleting these files, make sure to back them up first.

Now after you restart WMP you can begin adding your FLAC files. For those of us with large collections, it’s extremely annoying to see WMP try to pick up all of your media by default. To delete the other directories go to Organize \ Manage Libraries then open the directories you want to remove.

For example here we’re removing the default libraries it tries to check for music. Remove the directories you don’t want it to gather contents from in each of the categories.

We removed all of the other collections and only added the FLAC music directory from our home server.

SoftPointer Tag Support Plugin

Even though we were able to get FLAC files to play in WMP and WMC at this point, there’s another utility from SoftPointer to add. It enables FLAC (and other file formats) to be picked up in the library much easier. It has a long name but is effective –M4a/FLAC/Ogg/Ape/Mpc Tag Support Plugin for Media Player and Media Center (link below). Just install it by accepting the defaults, and you’ll be glad you did.

After installing it, and re-launching Media Player, give it some time to collect all of the data from your FLAC directory…it can take a while. In fact, if your collection is huge, just walk away and let it do its thing.

If you try to use it right away, WMP slows down considerably while updating the library.

Once the library is setup you’ll be able to play your FLAC tunes in Windows 7 Media Center as well and Windows Media Player 12.

Album Art

One caveat is that some of our albums didn’t show any cover art. But we were usually able to get it by right-clicking the album and selecting Find album info.

Then confirming the album information is correct…

Conclusion

Although this seems like several steps to go through to play FLAC files in Windows 7 Media Center and Player, it seems to work really well after it’s set up.

We haven’t tried this with a 64-bit machine, but the process should be similar, but you might want to make sure the codecs you use are 64-bit. We’re sure there are other methods out there that some of you use, and if so leave us a comment and tell us about it.

Update: Thanks to reader Pavel Chikulaev for pointing out that using this method won’t let you forward /rewind tracks or show track length. Hopefully someone out there has a fix for this?

Download madFlac V1.8

Go to Source Article at How to Geek