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When Mouse Clicks Go Wrong

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:12:45 +0000

Did it ever happen to you that a double-click on a file lead to moving the file instead for a pixels in the direction that you moved the mouse ? If you try to double-click a file and move the mouse for more than four pixels after the first click the file will be moved instead of executed.

While this error margin was sufficient when Windows 98 was the standard it proves to be a problem for many users who have got high end monitors with large resolutions. If you fall into this trap every now and then you might want to increase this error margin which can be done in the Registry.

I’m going to show you how to change the values. Press Windows R, enter regedit and hit enter. Now navigate to the Registry key ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop’. Look in the left window and search for the keys DragHeight and DragWidth which are both set to four pixels by default.

Double-click on entry at a time and edit the number. I suggest doubling it to eight first for both Registry keys. Changes become active immediately. Keep them for some time and see if they solved the problem. If they did not you might want to increase the value even further.

Move dllcache to another drive

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:07:35 +0000

My dllcache folder in system32 has a size of almost 450 Megabytes on my Windows partition. The dllcache is used to replace a system file (dll) that has been changed with the original one. It bothers me that this feature of Windows takes up so much space on my hard drive. It is even more serious in my case because I decided to have a rather small Windows partition, every byte counts if you know what I mean.

The idea was born to move the dllcache folder to another drive while keeping its functionality. To change the location of the dllcache folder you open the Registry (Windows R, regedit32, enter) and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion\ Winlogon and create a New expandable string value.

Name it “SFCDllCacheDir”. Double-click it afterwards and add the new drive as the new value for this registry entry (for instance e:\dllcache)

After rebooting your computer for the next time you will probably be prompted to put the Windows XP CD into the drive so that some files can be copied from it to the new dllcache location. Another way would be to simply move the files from the old folder into the new one.

If this is not happening automatically on your system you can use the command sfc /scannow to force Windows to fill the new folder with the files.

Lock Folders in Windows

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:37:58 +0000

Windows has no obvious method to lock folders, even administrators have no obvious way of locking folders. Locking folders could be important if you want to hide certain files or folders to prevent someone else from seeing them or altering the contents. You never know what your children could do until they do, so better lock the important folders.

Locking folders can be easily done with just two batch files that protects the contents. This is no fool proof method of course and everyone who is computer savy is able to counter this. You need to create two textfiles, add one line of code to each and save them as .bat files to make them executable.

Add the following line to the first text file ren xxxx xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} .Replace xxxx with the folder or drive name and save the file with the extension .bat, name it protect.bat for instance.

Now add the following line to the second text file and rename it unlock.bat. ren xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} xxxx. Replace xxxx again with the orginal name of the folder.

To lock a folder just click on protect.bat, to unlock it again click unlock.bat

source: tech-buzz