It is always a satisfaction to discover new tricks that can improve the performance of your computer, for this reason it is interesting and useful to know where to get your hands and modify those internal Windows parameters called Registry Keys . Most programs that promise to optimize your computer do nothing but change some of these keys automatically, setting values other than the default ones.
To have more control, to improve Windows performance and to enable or disable some superfluous features, it is much better to act without strange software often unclear and follow a guide like this to change the right registry keys.
For this guide, let's see 10 tricks from registry keys for Windows 7 (most also work on Windows XP and Vista) and values to modify to get improvements on the system .
READ ALSO: 8 Windows 10 tricks by modifying registry keys
To work on the registry, go to the Start menu, write the regedit command on the search box and press Enter.
On the right side there is the key tree to be expanded by clicking on the arrows next to the name, while on the right there are the values defined for each key.
To add a new variable just press the right mouse button on the blank in the right section, create a DWORD value and then give it a name and a decimal parameter.
To change a value, just double click on it.
1) Add a link to the Registry Editor in the Control Panel
First of all, to do it first and open the Windows registry editor, you can add a link to the control panel so that it can be started immediately without having to write the regedit command each time.
To do this, just download this zip file, extract it and then press on Add to find the link to the Registry Editor on the Control Panel and on Remove to delete it if you don't want it to appear.
2) Disabling aero effects (Snap, Shake, Peek) on Windows 7 is an operation already explained in another post.
Aero Shake is a feature of Windows 7 that allows you to maximize a window by taking it with the mouse and shaking it.
Aero Peek is the transparency effect of Windows windows
Aero Peek, on the other hand, is very useful and allows you to maximize the windows dragged to one side or a corner of the screen.
3) Disable the suggestions and notifications that often appear in the lower right corner near the clock .
In Windows Vista and Windows 7, whenever there is a problem or when a program is configured to show an alert, a speech bubble appears at the bottom right.
If you don't want to see these notifications anymore, you need to find the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced, create a new DWORD variable on the right with the name EnableBalloonTips, giving it 0 value.
4) Remove the word "Shortcut" when creating a new shortcut to a program or file .
If you right-click on an icon, you can create a new link for that file or for the program.
This file is renamed with the name " link to .... " which is a bit long and useless also because each link is characterized by the tab on the left corner.
To remove the word "link" from the Windows icons, go to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer key, find the "link" variable on the right and change the value from 1e 00 00 00 to 00 00 00 00 .
To apply the change, you must restart your computer.
5) Change owner of Windows and all information of the computer manufacturer
If you go to the Windows 7 search box, you can type the winver.exe command to see the name of the person who registered Windows.
This name can be modified from the registry by finding the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion key and then changing the RegisteredOwner variable with a name of your choice.
Restart the computer, type "winver.exe" and see the new name of the Windows owner.
As seen in another article, there is a very nice external program to change the manufacturer, model, logo and more in the computer information.
6) Deactivating the automatic restart of Windows after an update is a modification (explained in another post) that serves to stop the annoying warning that requires restarting the PC after installing the Windows Update patch.
7) Open the command prompt from any folder
In a specific guide I have already explained how to open and how to use the DOS command prompt.
If you want to add a quick link to the Windows context menu every time you right-click on a folder, you need to modify the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Drive \ shell \ cmd and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Drive \ shell \ cmd keys and rename the variable " Extended " in " Extended-BAK ".
From now, by pressing the right button on a folder, the item " Open command window here " will appear.
Without making this change, you can make this option appear by clicking on a folder with the right button and simultaneously holding down the Shift-CTRL keys.
8) Encrypt files from the right click menu
Encrypting a file on Windows is an operation that hides a file or folder from other users on the computer.
So if the PC is used by several people and each one enters with their own login credentials, it can be useful to protect files or folders through the Windows encryption function.
Then go to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced key, create a new DWORD value on the right, name it EncryptionContextMenu and give it a value of 1.
Now, when you right-click on a file or folder, the " Encrypt " item appears.
I also remember the best programs to password protect files and folders.
9) To turn off the PC faster there are several parameters and registry keys that can be modified.
10) Other registry keys to be changed on Windows are raised in another summary post on the tools to be used for registry changes.
