TIPS AND TRICKS

Win7 Tip - Skip The Log-On Screen
If you don’t want to click past the log-on screen every time you turn on you can disable it by pressing WinKey+R and typing 'control userpasswords2' in the box that appears. Now untick 'Users must enter a username and password to use this computer'.

Win7 Tip - Speed Up Your Boot Time
Reduce the time it takes to get up and running by typing 'msconfig' into the Start menu search bar and clicking through to the 'System configuration' screen. Now select the 'Boot' tab, click on 'Advanced options' and set the number of processors to two or four, depending on whether your CPU is dual or quad core.

Win7 Tip - Correct Your Colours
Windows 7 has a built-in tool for ensuring the colour accuracy of your photos. Click Start and type in DCCW to bring up the Display Colour Calibration Wizard, which will helpfully take you through settings for brightness, colour and contrast.

Win7 Tip - Minimise Windows Quickly
Gestures are big at the moment. Windows 7’s Aero Shake is particularly cool, allowing you to minimise all your unused windows by grabbing the title bar of the pane you want left open and shaking your mouse.

Win7 Tip - Fine-tune the easy way
There are tons of hidden settings in Windows that you could spend hours trawling the internet to find. Why bother? Just download EnhanceMySe7en (seriousbit.com) instead, which makes fine tuning your system easy.

Win7 - The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets
Click here to go to Tim Sneath's Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets.

Win7 - Gnoted's 70 Fantastic Windows 7 Tips & Tricks For Better Functionality
Click here to go to GNoted's 70 Fantastic Windows 7 Tips & Tricks For Better Functionality.

Win7 - TechRadar.com's 62 Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets
Click here to go to TechRadar.com's 62 Windows 7 Tips, Tricks and Secrets.

Win7 - 20 Windows 7 Tweaks & Tips
Click here to go to Maximum PC's 20 Windows 7 Tweaks and Tips article.

Free 64-Bit Software - Best Free Software for 64-Bit Vista and Win7
Click here to go to a review of the Best Free 64-Bit Software .

TV commercials spoil any free-to-air capture, but the Internet has spawned freeware tools that remove commercials automatically. You can even do it manually with most freeware video editors.

Can't watch those West Wing DVD's because they're region 1 and your DVD player is region 4? Get onto the Web and find the hack tha makes your DVD player region free. It could be as simple as a few key presses on your DVD remote. www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks is a great place to start looking.

HDTV broadcasts all have network logo watermarks that spoil the view but codehackers have developed freeware tools, such as the Logoaway VirtualDub filter, that can remove those watermarks. It's free, but also illegal.

Music DRM can typically be bypassed by burning it to a music CD and then re-ripping it to a non-DRM format (like MP3).

Users who don't have a region-free DVD player can readily convert their DVD's region by ripping the DVD to a PC's hard disk, stripping the region coding on the DVD, and re-burning the movie to a blank recordable DVD.

Make your DVD burner/DVD-ROM drive region free. New PC-based DVD drives give you five chances to change the region lock and then it's locked for good. But you can bypass that permanent lock with freeware software that resets your five changes whenever you want. Check out www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=485 for more.

Upgrade your digital SLR camera for free. The similarities between Canon's cheaper EOS 300D digital SLR and the more expensive EOS 10D have made the 300D a prime candidate for hacking. Some Russians have hacked together a firmware crack update, with details published on the www.digit-life.com Web site. Just remember, updating your camera's firmware with this means you void your warranty.

Don't get fooled: many popular tweaks for enhancing XP's performance are actually XP secrets you don't want to know about. Prefetch tweaks, disabling the paging file and /or System Restore, Registry cleaners and RAM optimisers are among the myths debunked at http://tinyurl.com/6akz3, and there's a link to each credible source for each.

Check out http://tinyurl.com/7hkkj to discover secrets for Paint and Defrag, hidden uninstall options for XP components and inbuilt cheats for Pinball, Minesweeper, FreeCell and Solitaire.

You can create cool desktop shortcuts to send an email, open a Web page, lock your PC and more. Find out how at http://tinyurl.com/e9lh7.

You can bypass the Welcome screen or Classic Logon Prompt, even if your PC has more than one user. The last part of the Microsoft Knowledge Base article at http://tinyurl.com./n9n2 gives a procedure that doesn't require editing the Registry.

Creating a printable list of fonts that you can use in your Word documents isn't exactly simple, but there's a cool Word macro you can create and use (see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=209205) which will do the lion's share of the work for you.