Windows 8: Tweaks

Fat Window border padding fix:

I am not a big fan of the fat window border padding in Windows 7 but it’s an easy fix to reduce it to zero (Control Panel–>Personalization–>Window Color–>Advanced Appearance settings–>Border Padding (in the Item menu).

There’s no such menu in Windows 8, but you can go straight to the Registry to access the setting you need.

HKEY_Current_User\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowsMetrics\PaddedBorderWidth

Change the string value to what you want, I prefer zero (0).

Get to the Desktop fast:

Another simple way to get to the desktop fast is to reposition the “Desktop” tile to be the upper left most tile.  After you log in and see the Tiles screen, just hit enter and you’re in.

Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool

The Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool is a great little utility I just discovered (its been around for years, but I never found it) when googling for a tool install Windows 7 from USB.  In short, you can easily take a Windows ISO image and quickly make a bootable USB flash drive to install Windows.

This is the first thing I’ve gotten from the Microsoft store and if this is the type of things they’ll have, I’ll definitely be a fan!

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

 

 You can do it manually also (this is how I used to do it)

Start a cmd prompt as Administrator

Type “diskpart”, and press enter

Type “list disk”, press enter and find your USB drive (make sure you get the correct disk, since it will be formatted!)

Type “select disk #”, press enter– where # is the disk from step 3

Enter the following commands followed by enter

• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• assign
• exit

Now from the command prompt, change to your mounted Windows 7 installation ISO or DVD drive.  If your ISO is mounted to V:, change to the V: drive.

change to the boot directory, “cd boot”

type “bootsect /nt60 x:”  where x: is the drive letter of your USB drive. You should get a “successfully updated ntfs filesystem message” if it worked.

finally, copy all the files from the DVD/ISO image to the USB drive.