Grupenet

Updated Jan 11th, 2011

If you’ve used Windows Media Player before you may have noticed that when you minimize it a mini-player in your Windows taskbar will appear. Believe it or not, similar functionality exists in iTunes. I’ll show you how to enable the taskbar player for iTunes.

Firstly, open up the iTunes Preferences under the “Edit” menu. In the preferences window that appears go to the “Advanced” tab. Find the option Minimize iTunes window to system tray and make sure it is unchecked.

Make your way down to the Windows taskbar. Right-click the taskbar, go to “Toolbars” and click on iTunes. Now whenever you minimize iTunes the taskbar player will appear, giving you limited control of your music without having to maximize iTunes.

NOTE: Using the iTunes taskbar player in Windows Vista will disable the taskbar transparency.

One of the tasks a Windows user looks forward to the least is likely to be defragmenting the hard disk. The defragmenter that ships with Windows, otherwise known as Windows Defragmenter (how original), does a horrible job at defragmenting when it comes to speed and resource usage.

I recently found a great freeware defragmenter called JkDefrag which does a very good job at defragmenting. The application is very quick and extremely lightweight, so it has minimal impact on resources. If you’ve downloaded the program, you will notice that there is more than one “version” of JkDefrag. These versions include the GUI version (most people will use this), command line version, and two screensaver programs.

The GUI version is what most people will use. You can also schedule it to defragment by using the Windows Task Scheduler. The command line version is pretty obvious. It allows you to defragment using command line. The screensaver programs allow you to set your Windows screensaver to the JkDefrag screensaver program so your computer will be defragmented every time your screensaver initiates.

Let me know if you know of any other good freeware defragmenters.

Ever notice those little arrow overlays over every shortcut in Windows? Do they bother you as much they they bother me? Glad we’re on the same track. Thankfully I recently discovered a great little application which will get rid of those little arrows. The program I’m talking about is called FxVisor.

After you’ve downloaded and installed FxVisor, launch it and you will immediately be given the choice of removing any arrow overlay from shortcuts or replacing the overlay with a different style which isn’t as much of an eye sore.

If you have removed the arrow overlay, FxVisor will also allow you to re-enable the default overlay. All in all, FxVisor is a great little application which will be of much help to any users who use desktop shortcuts to launch their applications, though I still recommend using differents methods for application launching.

Update
Apparently this will only work on Windows Vista. For those of you using Windows XP, the TweakXP Tweaking Utility will allow you to remove the arrow overlays, supposedly.

Windows Vista has a really cool disk caching feature called ReadyBoost which, when enabled, can use almost any USB 2.0 flash memory to cache system tasks. Unfortunately, ReadyBoost will only use USB sticks it considers fast enough. The upside of this is that ReadyBoost can easily be tricked into thinking your slower USB stick is in fact lightning fast.

If you haven’t already, plug in your USB stick. Open your Start menu and click “Computer”. From here you should be able to see your USB stick.

Next right-click on your USB stick and select “Properties”. Go to the “ReadyBoost” tab and make sure “Stop testing this device” is checked. If there is no checkbox, your USB stick already works with ReadyBoost and you shouldn’t even be reading this tutorial. Click “OK” and unplug your USB stick.

Now comes the fun part where you have to dig around in the Windows registry. Open your Start menu, type regedit in the search field, and press enter. After accepting the UAC dialog, the Registry Editor should open up.

Using the left folder pane, navigate your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > EMDMgmt. In the left pane you should now see a list of USB devices that Vista has tested. Find the one for the USB stick you’re using and click on it. A list of values concerning your USB stick will be displayed.

Double-click the DeviceStatus entry, change the value to 2, and click OK. Use the same method for the entries ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, but change their values to 1000. Go ahead and close the Registry Editor. Phew! You’ve made it through the toughest part!

Pop in your USB stick, go to the Start menu, and click Computer. Open up the Properties for your USB stick once again and click the ReadyBoost tab. Select “Use this device” and adjust the amount of reserved space for ReadyBoost to whatever you want. Click OK to save the changes.

That’s it! You’re done! Now Windows Vista will use your USB stick to run system tasks in the background.

One of my biggest gripes with iTunes is that it is only capable of syncing with the iPod. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise since Apple doesn’t want you to buy any other MP3 player other than the iPod. I’ve run into several people who love using iTunes to manage their music library, but would rather use a different brand MP3 player. Up until this point there hasn’t been a solution to achieve this, at least on the Windows side of things.

Thanks to Binary Fortress Software, syncing your MP3 player with iTunes is now possible with iTunes Sync. This application is only available for Windows. If you’re a Mac OS X user, check out SyncTunes.

To date, iTunes Sync will work with most players by Cowon, Creative Labs, Dell, iRiver, JVC, Samsung, and Sandisk. A full list of known working MP3 players can be found here. Sorry Zune owners. The developer says it will be next to impossible to add support for the Zune.