Every time I install or reinstall Windows, I find myself stopped, stymied, and stupefied by the operating system's default settings. Here are six tricks I rely on to make Windows easier to live with.

Create Your Own Stickies

Many shareware utilities let you put virtual sticky notes (designed to behave like the digital equivalent of paper Post-It Notes) on your screen; but a simpler way to add these notes takes advantage of Windows' support for long file names.

>>TIP To use this home-grown annotation technique, open Explorer (or any folder window) and choose View, Folder Options or Tools, Folder Options, depending on your version of Windows. Click the File Types tab, and then select New or New Type. In Windows 2000, Me, or XP, type stky for File Extension, and click OK. With the 'stky' extension selected in the 'Registered file types' list, click Advanced. Type Sticky Note in the box next to the Change Icon button. In Windows 98, type stky in the 'Associated extension' text box, and Sticky Note in the 'Description of type' box. In all versions, click the New button, type open in the Action text box, and enter notepad.exe in the 'Application used to perform action' box. Click OK, select the Change Icon button, and choose an icon to represent your new sticky notes.

I use a blank (invisible) icon I created myself using IconEdit Pro icon-editing shareware. But Windows provides icons that almost match the subtlety of IconEdit Pro's. To locate them, make sure that shell32.dll is listed in the 'File name' box ('Look for icons in this file' in Windows XP). In most versions of Windows, scroll through the icon list until you reach the icon in the third row of the eighth column (see FIGURE 1). Windows XP's invisible icons are in the second, third, and fourth rows of the thirteenth column (and the first row of the fourteenth column). Select one and click OK or Close as many times as needed to close all dialog boxes.

To add your new Sticky Note file type to your right-click New menu, choose Start, Run, type regedit, and press Enter. Click the plus sign next to 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT', right-click the key (folder icon) named .stky, and choose New, Key. Type ShellNew and press Enter. Select the ShellNew icon in the left pane, right-click inside the right pane, and choose New, String Value. Type NullFile, press Enter, and exit the Registry Editor.

Make sure that your system is set to hide file extensions of known types: In the Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab and confirm that 'Hide file extensions for known file types' is checked. (In XP, this option appears as 'Hide extensions for known file types'.)

To add a sticky note to the desktop or to any folder window, right-click it, choose New, Sticky Note, type the text of your note, and press Enter (see FIGURE 2). You can't use colons, question marks, or other characters that are forbidden in file names. If your notes aren't wide enough, right-click the desktop, choose Properties, and click the Appearance tab. In Windows XP, click Advanced. In all versions, choose Icon Spacing (Horizontal) from the Item drop-down list. Increase the Size value and click OK. Note text that exceeds two lines will be truncated--an ellipsis symbol (...) will indicate this--but you can see the whole note by selecting it. To make a note longer than 255 characters, double-click the note and add supplementary information in Notepad. To move a sticky note, simply drag the icon area above the text.

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