If you are looking for making Windows 7 open the list of drives screens (“Computer” or “My Computer”) change the shortcut command to

%windir%\explorer.exe /e,::{20d04fe0-3aea-1069-a2d8-08002b30309d}

I really hate Google search service on one issue, the main search page by default chooses the language of the country of request origin. If Google had to proactively guess the language of my choice, they would have better used the “Language Preference” that I have set in the browser, but instead they blindly stuff everybody up with the language of the country of the requests origin.

For this reason I have set my home page to http://www.google.com/ncr which opts-out the ultra smart Google logic of throwing you onto the local countries locale search page. I believe NCR stands for No Country Redirect, but that expansion was not from an official channel.

This is more painful when you are searching the web using browsers inbuilt “Search Providers”. The user is simply thrown into the result page that is based on the foreign language, and clicking on the Google logo takes you to the main page with all your search result discarded into the void.

For Firefox, Opera and Chrome it was easy for me to customize the “Search Provider” through the built-in interface of the browsers, but on IE 8 there is no option to edit the exiting “Search Providers” (you can add, remove, enable, disable, move up, move down, but no Sir you cannot edit it!).

Fed-up with this restriction I went around the net to find the location where IE stored its Search Providers list and came across this blog post which described how to add default search providers by directly making entries in the registry.

It turns out the repository for all search providers for IE is located at

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes]

so, I edited my existing entry for Google’s provider from

http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:{language}:{referrer:source}&ie={inputEncoding?}&oe={outputEncoding?}

to

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&num=50&q={searchTerms}&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:{language}:{referrer:source}&ie={inputEncoding?}&oe={outputEncoding?}&safeSearch=false&safe=images&newwindow=1&gl=us

Now it stills returns me the results from the local data centre, but at least the interface is in English and I get to have 50 results in one go and results are set to open in new window and that's neat!

References:

Steve Novoselac for providing with the registry location details of IE’s search providers

Google Search Protocol Reference

Peter “TCSM” Wailes for Google search parameter debunking

Cheers!

This Microsoft help page is of no use - Command-line switches in Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 - OneNote - Microsoft Office Online

Instead use: “%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Office\Office12\ONENOTEM.EXE” /tsr

Have a nice day!

The Opera browser is my preferred browser as of now, with its low loading time and in-built support for mouse gestures and so many other small good things; it has established itself as the best choice for my taste. Even though it is great as it is out of the package, it helps a lot to customize it to iron out some quirks.

1. Adding Wikipedia quick search option

One of the neat things of Opera is that you can provide a quick search option, using which you can just provide a prefix letter and type your search term straight from the address bar; no need for any specialized area for making your search. Want to search google? or Yahoo!? or Answers? you can do just all this just by providing the appropriate prefix and typing your search term from the address bar (e.g., just typing "g vijay shankar ganesh" would search the term on google whereas providing "y vijay shankar ganesh" would search the same term on Yahoo!).

But, what escapes my logic is that how come they missed adding Wikipedia to the pre-built quick search options? Well, anyway its not much of a problem, all you need to do is Tools -> Preferences (Ctrl + F12) -> Search and then add the following details:

Name: Wikipedia Search

Keyword: w (w is by default used for download.com search, I seldom use it so I change w to use Wikipedia instead)

Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

That's it, press OK and now you can just type "w" proceeded by your search term and you will be directly taken to the appropriate Wikipedia article if that's found or else it will take you to the result page of Wikipedia Search.

2. Open Folder option for transfers

Another one of those options which obviously needs to be present by default, it makes you wonder why it's the not the case though. Once your download / transfer has finished downloading / transferring, the right-click option on the transfers screen only provides you with option to directly execute / open the file. I most of the time prefer opening the folder where the download has taken place and then do what's needed of the file. This can be accomplished by following the method described in the following blog post:

http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/open-folder-in-transfers-right-click

Cheers!

It was quite hard to get the system to get into installation mode through the windows install CD or when trying to boot from one of the PE based boot CD's (BartPE, Ultimate Boot CD) on Dell Optiplex 755. The main culprit was the SATA harddisk and DVD drive, since the drivers for these models are not available (even after making a BartPE from the already existing Windows Installation).

The best method to overcome the problem was change the Drive Operation settings in the BIOS to "legacy" mode, so that they show up as normal IDE drives. I guess I am feeling the drives have become bit slower now, but that's the compromise needed to be taken in order for installing/reinstalling another version of Windows.