Wednesday, September 9, 2009

TweakUI in XP - Change default locations like "My Documents"

This post is to share few great things to do with tool TweakUI which is one of the collections in XP Power toys suite from microsoft. Click the link to download TweakUI for x86
1. Change Default Locations for documents
The first thing that i did was to change the default location of My Documents which is C:\Documents and Settings\bhavtosh\My Documents
Because windows saves every document [doc, txt, xls, jpg etc] in the above location and many times when i rebuilt my machine with XP; i always missed out taking the backup from the above location and i did lost important number of times
So using tweakui i found a very good way of redirecting windows to map to my custom location for all documents. Just refer to the snapshot below and rest is self explanatory
You can change lot of default places to your custom locations and next time when you open windows explorer you will new settings.
2. Reduce time for right click
Those who like "Creating a folder" using right click a lot but get bored as windows takes time in populating the context menu is because if you have software like office, winzip, winrar etc then by default windows loads all the possible types of "document/files" extensions that you may create using the stated tools. For example see the below snapshot; it shows what i have on my machine
Im habitual of using new option to create folder and nothing else but since i have so many tools and windows takingtime to load the menu; i used tweakui to help me making my right click-new option to come much faster than before. below snapshot will tell you how
There are other things to do as well but i leave it you to explore the power of this tool. 
Hope this useful.