Spell check is a great and necessary feature for all of us who are either not very good at spelling or not good at typing without typos. But what if the application that you are working on, does not have spellcheck. Of course, you could copy the typed text to another application which has spellcheck feature and check the spellings.

But there is an easier way.

Just download TinySpell. As the name suggests, it is a tiny application that runs on your system tray. Now whenever you are typing in any application, TinySpell watches your spelling on the fly and whenever it detects a misspelled word, it alerts you with a beep as well as shows a spelling tip. It can also check the spelling of text that you copy to the clipboard.

TinySpell is available in two versions, one a paid version and the other totally free. The free version should be good enough for most of us. But if you want some added features you could go for the paid version.

TinySpell can either be installed or you could use the portable version than can be run even from a pen drive.

Download TinySpell

In response to my earlier post on Suresh Addin, I have received several emails and comments asking for how to install the addin in Excel 2007/2010. The original post only had instructions on how to install the addin in earlier versions of Excel.

So here I describe how to add the Suresh Addin, or for that matter any Excel Addin in the newer versions.

As I only have Office 2010 installed on my computer, I will be using screenshots from that but if I remember right, the process is almost exactly the same in Excel 2007 too.

1. Start up Excel and click on File > Options.

2. In the options window, click on Add-Ins.

3. In the Add-ins options, right at the bottom, you will find the Manage option. Make sure that ‘Excel Add-ins’ is selected in the drop-down box and click on the Go button.

4. The Add-Ins window that appears is the same as in the older versions of Excel. Click on the Browse button and select the Addin you want to add and click Ok.

You can now start using the Addin in your Worksheets.

Windows 7 installation does not include several applications that came bundled with earlier versions of Windows. Applications like Windows Mail, Windows Messenger, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Photo Gallery were automatically installed with earlier versions of Windows but are no longer included in Windows 7.

This is primarily due to the various legal issues that arose out of Microsoft bundling free non-core applications with Windows. However, if you are used to using the above programs, you can still get them for free but you need to download it separately. Microsoft now offers these applications for free download as part of the new Windows Live Essentials program. As part of this program, the names of the programs have been changed to include “Windows Live” in the title. Also, a few new programs have also been made available.

Here is what you can download for free:

1. Windows Live Family Safety (This helps to monitor and control your children’s Internet access.
2. Windows Live Mail
3. Windows Live Messenger
4. Windows Live Photo Gallery
5. Windows Live Movie Maker
6. Windows Live Toolbar
7. Windows Live Writer (for creating blogs posts)

To download and install any or all of these applications, follow these steps:

1. Point your web browser to download.live.com and click the Download button.
2. When you see the File Download dialog box, click Run.
3. If you see a User Account Control prompt, click Yes.

4.  You will see the Windows Live window. Check those applications you want to install.Click install to begin the download and installation.

That’s all to it. You can now begin using the applications.

Windows 7 tweakers have recently uncovered a hidden shortcut that grants users access to all of the OS’s configuration settings in one unified window.

To get at this secret dashboard, create an empty folder and rename it to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

The folder icon will instantly change into a shortcut to the ultimate control panel.

If you are running Windows 7, and you are wondering whether your computer is using more power than it needs to, worry no more. Windows 7 has a built in tool called Powercfg that can help you analyze how efficiently you computer is using power and it can also point out the problem areas to you.

Efficient power management is all the more important in a laptop and Powercfg could be a very useful tool to prolong your laptops battery life.

Here is how you use powercfg.

1. Open up the command prompt with administrative privileges. To do this, click on the Start button and in the search box enter cmd. Now press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open the command prompt window in an elevated mode. Alternatively you can right click cmd in the resulting list and click on Run as Administrator.
2. Once the command window opens, type powercfg –energy in the prompt and hit Enter.
3. Powercfg will analyze you computers behavior for the next 60 seconds.
4. Once powercfg has finished analyzing your computer, you can open the energy-report.html file that is generated in the System32 folder. The report categorizes the findings under Errors, Warnings and Information.

Based on the report, you can tweak your system to make it more power efficient.

Here is what the report looks like.

Windows 7 includes a number of pre-configured themes that lets you easily personalize your desktop. Besides the default themes, Microsoft makes available a variety of additional themes online.

But did you know that apart from the installed themes that appear in the Personalisation window, there are a few more themes that aren’t visible by default. These are themes for the different countries or regions where Windows 7 is available. By default, you see the themes for your country, for example, if you are in Australia, you see the Australian theme. But there are also themes included for United States, Canada, Great Britain, and South Africa. But you need to know where to look for them. Here’s where:

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the C:\Windows\winsxs\ folder.
2. Enter *.theme into the search field, and then click Enter.
3. You would see a list of files named AU, CA, GB, US and ZA as shown below.

Double-click the them file you want to install. The theme will be immediately and thereafter appear in the Personalization window.

FixWin is a free utility from thewindowsclub team that requires just over 500KB of space, runs without installation, and quickly fixes 50 different Windows glitches. You would other wise need to meddle with the Registry to fix many of these problems. For example, if your Recycle Bin icon is missing, you can fix it with a single click.

The fixes have been catergorised into 5 categories: Windows Explorer, Internet & Connectivity, Windows Media, System Tools, and Additional Fixes. Each of the problems is presented with a brief but clear description of the problem. To correct the problem just click on the Fix button alongside the problem description.

FixWin can also scan your machine for corrupted system files. Just to be on the cautious side, FixWin lets your create a System Restore point before making any changes.

Download FixWin

On the lighter side:

One condition that might prevent you from running FixWin is the Requirements – if you go by FixWin page on PC World. As you can see from the screenshot below, taken from the PC World website, it appears that you need ‘Ramesh Kumar’ to run the app. Ramesh Kumar is the author of the tool and requiring him to be present every time you want to run the application isn’t feasible.

One of the cool features in Windows 7 is that you can pin your favorite applications to the taskbar so that you can easily launch them when needed.

What if you want to pin a folder that you frequently use? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access your favorite folders quickly from the taskbar? Unfortunately, Windows only allows you to pin Windows Explorer and not a specific folder. But with a little trick you can pin folders to the taskbar.

To do this you need to trick Windows 7 to think that your folder is a separate application. How do you do that? It’s quite simple actually.

Step 1: Right-click on the desktop and create a New Text Document and save it with the name of the folder you want to open but with an .exe extension.

Note: Make sure that your settings are set to show file extensions. To do that, go to Folder Options from the Control Panel and click on the View tab. In the list of advanced settings list, uncheck the ‘Hide extensions for known file types’.

Step 2: Open up the folder you want to pin and copy the path.

Step 3: Right-click on the dummy file that you created and on the context menu that pops up, select ‘Pin to taskbar’.

Once you see your file in the taskbar, right-click and when the menu appears right-click again on the menu and select properties. In the Target field paste the folder’s path that you copied in Step 2.  You could also change the icon to whatever you want. Click Ok.

That’s it. Clicking the pinned file will now open the folder.

Recently I purchased an assembled desktop pc from a known vendor. On testing, everything  worked  fine, except that when I connected a headphone to the audio output panel on the  front of the cabinet, I did not receive the audio. After the basic checks I concluded that there  indeed was a problem.

So I called up the vendor and told him the issue. He immediately told me that most Mercury  cabinets have this problem and that the front audio terminals do not work and as far as he  knew there was no way to rectify it. Apparently, the only way out was to change the cabinet.  But the guy told me that the other cabinets may not look as good as the Mercury ones.

Well, just to make sure that there was indeed no solution to the problem, I searched the web and within minutes I found the solution.

It turns out that the problem is with the auto-sensing. When I insert a audio jack in the rear  terminal the sound manager, which in my case is the Realtek Audio Manager, detects it and  instantly a pop up comes up asking for the type of device that was plugged in. But when I insert the same in the front terminal, no such pop-up appears as the sound manager does not detect it and hence the terminal does not get activated.

Fortunately, this can be fixed. All you have to do is disable the front panel jack detection. It’s quite simple. Here’s how I did it in case of the Realtek Audio Manager. If you have another  sound manager, it should also probably have some way of disabling the detection.

Step 1:    Open the Realtek HD Audio Manager by double-clicking on the red speaker icon in the system tray. Alternately, you can right-click on the icon and select ‘Sound Manager’.

Step 2:    On the Audio Manager window, click on the Detector Settings. It is the small folder icon towards the right edge of the window.

Step 3:    In the Connector Settings window, enable the ‘Disable front panel jack detection’ by  checking it.

That’s it. Your front panel audio should now be working.

Have you ever wanted to let a friend quickly borrow your windows computer, but didn’t want to worry about them looking through the other applications that you have open, like, maybe an instant messenger window? One way would be to save and close all the other applications before you hand over the machine to your friend.

But there is a better way. There is this tiny piece of freeware from Duriosoft.info called LockThis that was created for situations just like this. LockThis password protects your minimized applications. Just press the Control key as you click on the minimize button on the application window. Now, anyone who wants to restore the minimized applications would first need to enter a password before they can view the application.

LockThis works with almost all applications but could have problems with some apps. For instance, LockThis does not work with Firefox. Also, do not expect mere folder windows to be protected upon minimization.

The default password is LockThis!. Do remember to change it upon installation.

Download LockThis!