It was more than two years ago that we first highlighted DisplayFusion as a great way to put more than one wallpaper on each of your desktops, and since then the software has continued to improve with full support for Windows 7 taskbars and Aero.

DisplayFusion, the Free Version

Arguably the best feature in DisplayFusion is the ability to put more than one wallpaper on your each of your multiple monitors, but you can also span a single wallpaper across the entire desktop, and size them different ways to make them fit.

You can also use the built-in wallpaper browser to pull in images from Flickr or Vladstudio.

You can then browse through and find a wallpaper that you like, and assign it to the desktop.

There’s an enormous amount of hotkeys that are built right in:

And you can add buttons to the window title bar for various functions, like moving windows from one monitor to the other. (Limited to 1 button for the free version)

For instance, here I’ve added a button that moves the window to the next monitor.

It’s an extremely useful software, but the best part is that you can just download and use all these features (and more) for free. 

Pro Edition Features

The Pro edition adds more functionality—you can add more buttons to the title bars, do a little more configuring with the hotkeys (or add new hotkeys), or the most interesting feature: Add a Taskbar on each monitor!

The taskbar isn’t identical to the Windows 7 one, but it does look very similar, and even includes mouse-over hover previews. Unfortunately the previews don’t seem to do Aero Peek yet, but one can only assume that feature will be coming eventually.

The Pro edition also adds the ability to rotate between wallpaper images, either on your computer, or from Flickr or Vladstudio.

The Rules (Important!)

So you want a copy of the Pro version? We have FIVE copies to give away, and we’ll be selecting them randomly from the comments. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Grab yourself a free copy of DisplayFusion (you can get a free trial of Pro if you want, or stick with the free one).
2. Leave a comment explaining one (or more) thing you like about the software, and one thing you think could be improved. Be sure to use your real email address.
3. To cut down on accidental spam filtering, include the keyword DisplayFusion in your comment.
4. We will announce the winners in the weekly roundup, so you have a couple of days to participate.

Make sure that your comment includes something you like, and something you don’t like. If you don’t think it can be improved, say that, but if you completely hate it, maybe leaving a comment is a waste of time =)

Download DisplayFusion (Free or Pro) from binaryfortress.com

Using Desktop Slideshow 

To create your slideshow right-click on the desktop and click Properties.

Click on Desktop Background located at the bottom of the window.

Now hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and select each picture you would like to show on the desktop. Then choose the amount of time to to change the pictures, you can select from 10 seconds all the way up to a full day. Click the box next to Shuffle to vary them up even more.

After you’ve enabled this setting you’ll notice it says Slide Show under Desktop Background.

If you’d rather not muck around in the properties panel to add new wallpaper, you can simply head into the folder with all of your pictures, wallpapers, or photos, select the ones you want and use “Set as desktop background” from the right-click menu.

Once you’ve enabled the desktop slideshow, if you want to skip over to the next wallpaper you can simply right-click on the desktop and then use “Next desktop background” from the menu.

This is a great way to add variety to your desktop, show off some pictures you’ve taken, or just mess around with while you’re bored at work.

It’s a little difficult to showcase how well this thing works with a screenshot, but you can see the partially transparent Alt-Tab switcher window, complete with a massive preview window and the window titles easily readable.

VistaSwitcher works on XP, Vista, and Windows 7… but it really works best on a system with Aero support, since the Compositing Desktop Window Manager (DWM) built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 makes it run silky smooth.

Awesome Keyboard Window Manipulation

Once you’ve brought up the Alt-Tab dialog, you can use the “S” key to select more than one window at a time—and then you can use the C, V, or H keys to either Cascade, Tile Vertically, or Tile Horizontally for just the windows that you’ve selected. The X key will close them, or the M key will minimize them… there’s actually a whole set of hotkeys that you can use to manipulate open windows.

Switch Between Open Instances of a Single Application

One of the few features that I’ve always been jealous of from the Mac OS X operating system is the Alt+` shortcut key that switches between open windows of a single application—and now with VistaSwitcher, I’ve got that feature on Windows.

Just hit the Ctrl+Alt+Tab shortcut key combination, and you’ll be able to switch between just windows from that same process—in my case, I’m switching between open Google Chrome windows.

Awesome Tip: If you head into the preferences, you can re-map the “Application windows hotkey” to Alt+` and get the same feature built into Mac OS X – it will allow you to just switch between open windows of the same type.

Tweaking VistaSwitcher

Want to tweak the preview screenshot size? No problem, just crank the width and height up a bit, and slowly increase the number of items value. You’ll have to tweak the settings for your own personal preferences, but having a full-size switcher makes it really easy to flip between applications.

For my 1920×1080 display, I changed the item width to 600, the item height to 42, and number of items to 15. This ended up giving me a switcher window that was nearly full-screen, making switching between applications so much easier.

The “Window” style setting changes the preview window from being a full view of the desktop, and just showing the window itself. In my testing that didn’t work as well, but since the app is still in beta it doesn’t seem like a big problem.

VistaSwitcher actually has support for multiple monitors, so you can filter tasks for just the monitor you are on. Excellent!

The Exclusions tab lets you filter some applications from the preview, or exclude from the task list entirely. It’s an excellent additional feature to an already excellent application.

Summary

Yeah, if you don’t like awesome eye-candy and increased usability this might not be the thing for you. Otherwise, you should at least give it a test drive. It’s still in beta, so there’s a possibility of crashing here or there, but NTWind Software is a very reputable website—we’ve been using their utilities for years on all of our PCs here at HTG HQ.

Download VistaSwitcher from ntwind.com

When you first start the Windows 7 installation the first thing you will do is select a language, time and currency format.  This is where Windows determines what themes you’re presented with by default.

Being from the US I’m presented with location specific themes from the United States with desktop backgrounds such as scenery from Maine, Idaho, Oregon etc.

To access the other international themes copy and paste the following path into the search box and hit Enter.

C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT

In the MCT folder you will find additional themes for Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain.

You can go in and grab just the Wallpapers…

Or go into the Theme folder double click on the the thumbnail to add it. 

Here you can see I added all of them and now they will be available under the My Themes section for when you want to change them around.

This is a neat little trick that will let you customize Windows 7 with hidden themes already available.  Also if you want to get more themes head over to the Microsoft site.

First we’ll show you how to simply power off the monitor, and then how to both lock and power it off.

Create a Shortcut to Turn Off the Monitor

To create this shortcut, we’ll first need to grab a tiny multi-purpose utility called NirCmd from the great folks over at NirSoft. This Swiss-army knife tool can do an amazing array of tasks, including powering off the monitor. All we really need to do is create a shortcut to it.

Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut:

Then you’ll want to browse to the location where you saved the nircmd.exe file, and add the following arguments:

“C:\path\to\nircmd.exe” cmdwait 1000 monitor off

Make sure the path has quotes around it, and then you add the extra arguments, which will wait 1 second before powering off the monitor (otherwise Windows might misinterpret your last keystroke and wake back up).

Next you can go into the shortcut properties and assign a shortcut key, and then click Change Icon to pick a better one than the default.

In Vista, at least, there’s a great icon for turning off the monitor… pick the somewhat ugly one from the list below:

And when the icon actually shows up, it’s nice and shiny. Of course you are free to pick your own icon instead.

Lock the Workstation Too

For extra credit, you can create a shortcut that both locks the workstation as well as turns the monitor off. Unfortunately the Nircmd way involves more steps than necessary in Vista (in my testing, at least), so I’ve created a tiny executable called LockAndPowerDown.exe that will do both in one step.

To install it, simply download and extract the executable, and create a shortcut to it just as you did in the step above. To find the same icon, click on Change Icon, and then paste in “C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll” into the browse box.

The application is written in AutoHotkey and the source code is included in the download file. Enjoy!

Download LockAndPowerDown from howtogeek.com

After a quick installation you are presented with options for setting up your fences.  Choose an existing layout to get started or create your own right away.  If you go with a custom layout and don’t like it no worries as it is very easy to customize.

If you go the layout route you are presented with a couple of layouts to choose from.  If you have a messy desktop you might want to go with the sort icons layout.  It will put everything into a labeled fence then you can tweak them how you want as you begin using them.

After choosing your layout Fences is ready to go.  At any time you can go into Fences Settings to change different features, layout, and look of Fences.

You can place as many icons into each fence by dragging the shortcut or icon into the fence.  Individual fences can be easily resized by dragging the outer edges.

Now the desktop icons will be arranged into different categories.  You can drag the fences to different areas on the desktop that make most sense to you.  You can also rename, customize, and create new fences.

You can customize the how the fences look by adjusting Transparency, color, and Brightness.

To rename a fence just right click on it and select Rename then type in a new title.

Fences is a free, customizable, and very easy to use application for organizing your desktop.  It will work with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 or 64 bit editions).  If you are looking to make that messy desktop more efficient Stardock’s Fences may be exactly what you need.

Download Fences from Stardock

This technique comes to us from How-To Geek Forums member whs, who is not only a prolific poster on our forum, but on other forums as well.

Pinning Folders to the Start Menu

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a shortcut to the folder you want to pin to the start menu, because we’re just pinning the shortcut instead of the folder itself. Then simply drag that shortcut down to the Start orb, but don’t release the mouse button yet…

Note that for the example I created the shortcut on the desktop, but you’ll want to create the shortcut somewhere else since you can’t delete it once you’ve pinned it.

The start menu will pop up, and you’ll want to then use the mouse (with the button still held down) to move the shortcut up where the pinned shortcuts usually are (above the gray line)… then you can release the button.

At this point you should have a pinned shortcut to that folder on your start menu.

This is a very convenient technique to use for pinning the Downloads and Videos folder to the start menu, since for some odd reason Microsoft gives you Pictures, Music, and even Games… but not the rest.

The solution is a small Windows Sidebar Gadget called Pidglet that interacts with an included plugin for Pidgin. Thanks to our extremely helpful forum member Justin for finding this gadget.

Installing Pidglet

Before installing the Gadget you’ll need to install the Pidgin plugin… if you don’t install in the right order you’ll get some error messages, but don’t worry because it’s simple.

After downloading and extracting the zipfile, you will need to browse down to your Pidgin installation directory, and find the Plugins directory:

C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins

Once you are there, then you’ll want to copy the pidglet.dll file into the folder (clicking through the UAC prompts if you haven’t disabled UAC yet)

Now you’ll need to open up Pidgin and go to Tools \ Plugins and enable Pidglet (Note that you need to have a fairly recent version of Pidgin)

Now you can install the sidebar gadget by double-clicking on the Pidglet.Gadget file that you extracted.

If that doesn’t immediately load the gadget, you should be able to use Add Gadgets…

And then drag the Pidglet gadget somewhere on the desktop.

At this point you’ll have a small gadget on your desktop with your Pidgin contacts, and you’ll want to click on the small wrench that shows up when you hover over it:

In the settings dialog you can configure the colors, but more importantly you can change it to show all of the people on your list, or at least more than 4 contacts.

The advanced option lets you specify a custom Pidgin profile folder… most likely you won’t need to bother.

Download Pidglet Gadget for Windows Vista Sidebar

Update

Appears that the original site is down for whatever reason. I’ve put a mirror copy up and you can download it here.

If you don’t know what we’re talking about, I mean the menu that shows up when you right-click on the desktop:

For today’s lesson we’ll show you how to add Notepad to the menu, but you could add any applications you want instead.

Step 1: Browse to the Registry Key

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell

The screen should look similar to this one if you are in the right place.

Step 2: Create the Menu Item Key Name

To complete this step we’ll need to create a new key, the name of which is exactly what is going to show up on the desktop menu.

Right-click on the “shell” key, and then choose New \ Key from the menu.

Give the new key the name that you want to show up on the desktop context menu. For this example we’ll be using Notepad.

Optional Step: If you want to assign an “Alt” key to this menu entry for quicker access, you can change the (Default) value on the right and put an & character in front of the key you want to use. For instance, if you wanted to be able to just use the N key to launch Notepad once the desktop context menu pops up, you can do this:

Personally I don’t find this terribly useful since you have to use the mouse to right-click on the desktop… may as well just use the mouse to click the item. Still, for completeness I’ve included it.

Step 3: Create the Command Key

Next you’ll need to create the command key that will actually hold the command used to launch the application. Right-click on the new Notepad key, and then choose New \ Key from the menu.

Give this key the name “command” in lowercase.

Step 4: Add in the Full Application Executable Path

To complete this step you’ll need the full path to the application that you want to launch. You can use Shift + Right-Click to get the Copy as Path menu item to find this more quickly.

Now click on “command” on the left side, and then double-click on the (Default) key in the right side to edit the string value.

Paste in the full path to the executable that you got from the “Copy as Path” step above, or you can put in the full path yourself if you’d like.

Once it’s done, it should look like this:

And right-clicking on the desktop will produce the new menu item… naturally, using this menu item should launch Notepad.

You can add as many applications to the desktop context menu as you’d like, just repeat the steps 2-4 again with a new menu item name.

Today we’ll explain where these menu items are hiding in your registry, how to disable them the geeky way, and an easier cleanup method for non-geeks as well.

Either way, your context menu won’t look like this one anymore…

Cleaning the Context Menu by Hacking the Registry

If you want to clean things up the truly geeky way, you can open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to one of the following keys… sadly the context menu items are not stored in a single location.

Most of the menu items that used for all files and folders can be found by looking at one of these keys:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFileSystemObjects\ShellEx

Items that are specific to folders can usually be found in one of these keys instead:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

The context menu items found at these different locations will need to be handled differently, and we’ll explain how, so keep reading!

Dealing with “shell” Items

Let’s take a look at one item as an example… if you browse down to the shell key under Directory you’ll see the items for Add to VLC media player and Play with VLC. Items under the regular “shell” key are usually really easy to spot, and easy to deal with.

If you want to hide one of these items so that you’ll have to Shift+Right-Click, then you can add a new string value on the right-hand side and name it “Extended” like you can see below:

If you’d like to disable it instead, but don’t want to delete the key, you can add a new string value and call it “LegacyDisable”.

And of course, you could just delete the whole key if you really wanted to… but I’d export a copy just in case.

Dealing with “shellex” Items

You probably noticed the other registry keys above that have “shellex” (Shell Extension) in the name instead of just “shell”. Those types of keys will need to be handled differently… for an example, we’ll head down to one of the keys mentioned above:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

These items will be a little more tough to decipher… but you can usually figure out an item by the key name on the left, and then just modify the (Default) value by putting a few dashes in front of it, which will disable the item without actually deleting anything.

In this example, I’ve clicked on 7-ZIP on the left, and by putting dashes in front of the value data I’ve disabled that menu item.

You’ll want to go through each location in the list at the top of this article until you figure out where exactly the offending items are located. At that point, you can use one of the tricks we mentioned in order to disable that item.

Dealing With Specific File Type Items

Sometimes, although not often, the menu items are located on the registry key for a specific file type. In that case you’ll need to first locate the file extension key by looking under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for that extension, which will tell you the name of the key that you need to look for.

For instance, if I wanted to remove a menu item for Excel documents (.xls) I would look at this registry key, which gives me the name of the actual key to look under…

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xls

As you can see above, the actual type of the file is “Excel.Sheet.8″, so I’ll then browse down to this registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell

And now I can use the same techniques as above to disable items under “shell”… remember LegacyDisable and Extended? Yep, those work here.

Cleaning Up the Context Menu the Easy Way

Instead of hacking the registry, you can use two different NirSoft utilities to clean up the context menu. Sadly, some of the menu items are implemented as Explorer shell extensions (like the “shellex” keys we explained above), and some are implemented as regular context menu items (like the regular “shell” keys we explained above).

The first tool we will check out is ShellMenuView, which allows us to manage all of those “shell” key items with an easy to use interface.

Just browse down until you find the offending item, then click the Disable button… which will actually create a LegacyDisable key just like we explained in the manual section above.

You’ll see that those items are instantly disabled:

Next, we need to disable those “shellex” or Shell Extensions, using another great Nirsoft utility appropriately called ShellExView. This one works the same exact way as the first utility… just click on the Disable button to remove the items.

After using both of these utilities for just a few minutes, I was able to get my context menu back to the pristine “new install” state. 

Go forth, and clean your context menu clutter! And yes, this works the same in all versions of Windows.

Download ShellExView from nirsoft.net

Download ShellMenuView from nirsoft.net