Sometimes in the life of a geek, we do something in front of a non-geek that shocks and amazes them. Sometimes it’s as simple as typing three keystrokes into a file open dialog. (At least it was for me yesterday)

I was doing some work on my computer with a friend sitting next to me, and her jaw dropped when she saw me navigating through the file open dialog with just the keyboard… so I decided to write up a number of other keyboard methods as well.

If you don’t already have a quick launch icon or a hotkey set to open a command prompt, there’s really quick trick that you can do on any Windows 7 or Vista computer to open up a command prompt without having to navigate the menu.

Just hold down the Shift key and right-click on the desktop…

If you’re moving from XP to Windows 7, you might need some help with the changes to the Start Menu. Here we have put together a list of some useful tips that will help you take control and master the Start Menu in Windows 7 and Vista.

Add Videos to Start Menu (Windows 7)

There are links to several things on the Start Menu by default, but the Videos folder is not one of them. To add it right-click on the Start button and select Properties, and under the Start Menu tab click on Customize.

The new Windows 7 Search is greatly improved over previous versions and allows you to search for data on local and networked machines. Today we take it a step further and show you how to extend the search capability to sites on the Internet.

You might be concerned with squeezing every last bit of performance out of your machine, or may have compatibility problems between Aero and an application that you are running. Either way you are looking for the simplest way to disable Aero while running that application, and this is it.

You can edit the properties of a shortcut and tell Windows to automatically disable Aero as soon as you start that application, and then re-enable it again once the application is closed.

Over at Lifehacker, I’ve written an article of interest to How-To Geek readers, about how well the default Windows security tools work if you just use a little common sense (and install Microsoft Security Essentials).

As everybody knows, using the Windows+L keys together will lock your workstation running Windows 7, XP or Vista. Did you realize that you can also disable this function by using a registry hack?

I suspect that this article will be much more useful to those of you who can’t lock your workstation, but either way we’ll show how to configure this setting.

Manual Registry Hack

Windows Mobility Center is a fairly useful tool for those of us using Windows 7 or Vista on a laptop computer, but might not be for everybody, especially since it takes over the Win+X keyboard shortcut.

If you would rather disable Windows Mobility Center, all it takes is a single registry tweak.

Manual Registry Tweak

Manual Registry Hack

Just open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box and navigate to the following key (create if it doesn’t exist)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

After writing the article about adding Notepad to the context menu I noticed all the comments from users that prefer to use a shortcut in the Send To menu, which got me thinking… I wonder if you can disable the Send To folder?

Of course you can easily disable it… naturally it’s a registry hack, so standard disclaimers apply.