50 Top Computing Tips Part II

Part II of our Top Tips story includes Vista secrets, better search methods, hardware tweaks, and ways to speed up your network. Here are 50 more of the most popular tips from the past year.

50 Top Computing Tips

Whether you're looking to fix what's broken, speed up what's slow, or just tweak for fun, our PC Magazine Tip of the Day can help. Here are 50 of the most popular tips from the past year.

Online Image Resize

Free online image resizer

Glary Registry Repair

Clean up and repair your Registry for free.

Use your PC for long enough, and you'll have problems with your Registry. Invalid Registry entries, software that doesn't clean up the Registry after it uninstalls, invalid paths and file associations, obsolete entries, the list of Registry problems can go on for a long time. They slow down your PC, cause system crashes, and generally muck up things.

You'll never be able to track down the problems yourself. So instead get this freebie, which scans the Registry for problems and fixes them fast. You'll also be able to choose which changes to accept, and which to ignore. The program creates an Undo file, so you can revert to your previous version of the Registry if problems occur.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Run virtual PCs in different Windows OSes with this Microsoft program.

Not running Windows Vista Ultimate--and have a program that needs it? With Virtual PC (downloadable), you can run other operating systems as if they were applications within Vista Ultimate. This is useful when you need a program that can't run in your current version of Windows, or when you want to browse safely.

Vista

What you need to know

Find the Cookies Folder in Vista

Q: Where can I find the Cookies folder in Windows Vista? When I ran Windows XP, I put a shortcut to the Cookies folder on my desktop. When I went to a Web site, I could quickly see how many cookies a site was putting on my computer and delete them if I wanted to. I've tried searching in Vista but haven't had much luck. Please help!—Walter Nowak

A: To find just about anything in Vista, you simply start typing its name at the Start menu. When you type cookies, it points you to C:\Users\username\cookies—great! Great, that is, until you click on the link and get an "Access Denied" slap in the face. In actual fact, that path is just a kind of pointer. The cookies are stored in a completely different location.

Open Windows Explorer, press F10 to see the menu, and choose Tools | Folder Options. Click the View tab. Find the option to Show hidden files and folders and check it. Find Hide protected operating system files and uncheck it (Vista will gripe). Now you can navigate to the actual location, which is twofold: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies and C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low.

If you like, you can put shortcuts to these on the desktop or elsewhere—just right-drag the folder, let go, and choose Create shortcut(s) here. These shortcuts will work even if you change the Windows Explorer options described above back to their default values.

Windows Essentials Codec Pack

Play any media file you can find with this add-in to your media player.

If you've ever come across a media file that wouldn't play in your media player, this freebie is the answer to your needs. It installs the codecs--short for coders-decoders--that your media player needs in order to play back many different kinds of media.

This isn't actually a standalone program. Instead, it gives your media player access to the codecs. So just install it, and you'll be able to view or listen to a wide variety of media files with your existing media player. And if you're not happy with your existing media player, it includes a copy of Media Player Classic, a simple, stripped-down media player that looks and works much like the first versions of Windows Media Player.

For the techies out there, here's the list of what it handles: Audio CDs, DVDs, (S)VCDs and XCDs on the fly, and it adds support for 3GP, AAC, AC3, APE, AVI, DivX, 3ivx, DAT, h.264, x264, AVC, Nero Digital, DTS, FLV, FLAC, HD-MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, M4A, MPC, MP3, MP4, MO3, MOD, MKV/MKA, MTM, OFR, TTA, OGG/OGM, S3M, Vorbis, VOB, WavPack, ATRAC3, XviD, XM, WV, and UMX.

CloneGenius

CloneGenius is an advanced disaster recovery and backup solution for your PC. Wizards guide you through creating an exact copy - or backup image - of your hard drive. CloneGenius also makes it easy to copy everything from your hard drive to a new hard drive when you upgrade the hardware in your computer. CloneGenius supports shrink on restore for FAT, FAT32, and NTFS.

And, it's free!

Vista's Flash for the Rest of Us

For eye candy, Vista’s funky Aero interface carries a high cost-hefty hardware requirements, not to mention the cost of the OS-but even XP users can press their faces to the window.