Sometimes Windows acts like an operating system on life support. Can the patient be saved? Well, I don't know about that--I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV--but I can help with triage.

Supercharge the Windows Key

The Hassle:I use the Windows key on my keyboard early and often, but it can do only so much. How can I get more use out of it?

The Fix: I know of a freebie that turns your Windows key into a super shortcut. Clavier+, a small utility, lets you create Windows-key combinations for opening virtually any program, pasting short strings of text, and performing other operations. For instance, I created custom shortcuts that can start my e-mail program and turn my PC's volume up or down.

Bonus tip #1: If you want your hands to stay on the keyboard, you have options. See "Keep Your Hands Off the Mouse" for a list of useful keyboard shortcuts that you probably don't know about. The article's ancient, but the shortcuts work.

Bonus tip #2: If you have a child, cat, hamster, or goldfish that occasionally taps on your keyboard, use the free ToddlerTrap utility to lock the keyboard down.

Reshuffle Your Keyboard

The Hassle:My Lenovo ThinkPad laptop's keyboard has no Windows key--a key I use often on my desktop PC. Am I out of luck?

The Fix: You need KeyTweak, a no-cost keyboard-remapping tool that arranges the keys in whatever way makes you happy. I suggest converting the Ctrl or Alt key on the right side of your ThinkPad's spacebar into a Windows key.

I used KeyTweak to swap the Esc key in the upper-left corner of the keyboard with the slant-apostrophe/tilde key directly above the Tab key. If you're a gamer and want to avoid the disaster of accidentally pressing the Windows key during a game (which may minimize the window), use KeyTweak to disable it temporarily. To use KeyTweak in Vista, you must be logged in as an administrator.

Grab Video Screens

The Hassle:I need to grab screens from videos running in Windows Media Player. But no matter what screen-capture utility I try, all I scrape is a black screen. Any ideas?

The Fix: The easiest solution is to use a capture-friendly player, such as VLC Media Player); click Video, Snapshot to capture a video frame. Or you can modify Windows Media Player's settings instead: Select Tools, Options, Performance, Advanced, uncheck Use Overlays, and click OK. Disabling overlays can hinder your playback performance, so you may want to re-enable overlays once you've captured your screen.

Freeze Your Drive Letters

The Hassle:When I mapped a network drive, Windows assigned it to the next available drive letter on my PC. When I plugged in a USB flash drive, Windows inexplicably gave it the same drive letter as the networked drive. Now I can't access either one. What the...?

The Fix: Congrats! You've uncovered an ancient Windows bug. One quick trick is to assign the network drive to a back-of-the-alphabet letter, such as Y: or Z:. If you're constantly plugging in flash drives and mapping and unmapping networked drives, however, use USBDLM, a very geeky freebie that runs as a Windows Service and automatically resolves drive-mapping conflicts by checking to see whether the letter is already in use, and assigning the next available letter if it is.