Windows Power Toys for Windows Vista

Ever since I switched to Vista x64, I’ve really missed some of the XP power toys, like “Open command window here” and another utility I used named Path Copy to give you a right click option to “Copy as path”… Tonight I discovered Vista has these built in.. you just have to hold SHIFT before you right click on the file or folder…

so for “Open command window here” you have to hold SHIFT when you right click and you’ll also get the “Copy as path” command.

There are a lot more power toys I used that were great, like TweakUI (to remove those nasty shortcut arrows), RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer, Image Resizer and Virtual Desktop Manager to name a few.

I will add more to this post as I discover replacements for all the Windows XP Power Toys we so love.

An update to this post!

Windows Media Center Power Toys are available!

Tweak MCE for Media Center Edition 2005

Tweak MCE gives you access to systems settings and options not normally exposed in the Media Center user interface, including remote control settings, Skip and Replay time customizations, user interface options, and more. It also helps you to optimize Media Center Extender for plasma and non-CRT displays

Alarm Clock

The Alarm Clock PowerToy works like an old-fashioned clock radio, via the Media Center remote control. The “sleep” function plays music or another media selection for a certain duration. “Wakeup” begins playing music or other programming at a time you specify.

Playlist Editor

The Media Center Playlist Editor allows you to create and edit playlists anywhere in the room using your remote control. Add songs by album, artist, title, or genre. Rearrange the songs in your existing playlists, or remove them entirely, all without ever touching a mouse or keyboard.

Solitaire

This PowerToy enables you to play Solitaire on your Media Center PC from anywhere in the room using your remote.

You can download them here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/mcepowertoys.mspx

DivX Vista Media Center “One or more codecs required to open this content could not be found”

Recently I upgraded my main media center to Windows Vista Home Premium edition.

I have quite a large collection of DivX movies I have encoded from DVD’s that wouldn’t work, even though I had the DivX codec installed. Media center either crashed completely, or I received an error “One or more codec’s required to open this content could not be found”

After searching and trying to resolve the problem I found Vista Codec’s by jtow’s! It completely solved my problem.

Remember to uninstall DivX before you install this program.

A must have for dual monitors! (Different wallpapers on each monitor!)

Are you using multiple monitors? I think most people are these days… and if you are, Ultramon is a MUST HAVE for you!

Not only can you have different resolutions for each wallpaper on each screen (in case each of your monitors is a different resolution and Eva Longoria’s bust looks shushed, or stretched 😀 ) or you just simply want a different picture on each display! 

You can also have your taskbar extend to the second monitor, and place what you have on your second display ON IT’S OWN TASKBAR!… it’s quite nifty for knowing which window is on what screen. It also helps keep the taskbar clutter free. It’s much much easier to sort and manage while working with many windows opened at once!

Anyway.. I could rant about this all night long.. here’s the link  go try it out for yourself! 😛

Starting and Stopping Disabling Services

net start

net stop 

To start say the DHCP server, enter “net start DHCP server” and to automatically start the DHCP service during the boot process you would enter “sc config dhcpserver start= auto”

and for stopping, simply enter “net stop DHCP server”

To Disable a service “disable servicename”