When you click the Windows Explorer shortcut which is Pinned to the Taskbar, or when running explorer.exe directly in Windows 7, the following error message may be displayed with text "explorer.exe" in the title bar.
This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Please install a program or, if one is already installed, create an association in the Default Programs control panel.
And using the WinKey + E key sequence causes "Unspecified error" (more…)
If you have a host application that you don’t want to be pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, you can do so by adding a registry value in the application registration area. By default Windows prevents the following host processes from being pinned to the taskbar.
… and other file names defined in the following registry key in string values HostApps, AddRemoveApps and AddRemoveNames
To remove the Pin to Taskbar (and "Pin this program to taskbar") context menu options for a particular application, use these steps: (more…)
When you insert a DVD media in the drive, right-click on the drive and choose Play from the context menu, the following error may occur.
Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.
However, you may be able to play DVD movies via the AutoPlay dialog, or by starting Windows Media Player and using the Play menu. This happens if the DVD/Play association setting is missing or incorrect, or is of incorrect value type. The DVD Play verb is stored in this registry key: (more…)
When a software installation which uses Windows Installer Package fails, you enable Windows Installer Logging and re-run setup to capture the output to a log file for troubleshooting. This can be done using three ways: using the Registry Editor, using the Group Policy Editor or by running the msiexec.exe command with required parameters.
The first two methods are documented in article How to Enable Windows Installer Logging. The third method uses the msiexec.exe command-line parameter. Here is an example:
This starts the 7-Zip .msi installation (7z465-x64.msi) and records all the results, including verbose output to a log file named mylog.txt located at D:\
Do you find it difficult to type the entire command-line everytime when you need to log application setups? No problem! You can implement this in the context menu for .msi files so that you can launch the installation with logging in a couple of mouse clicks. (more…)
Recently I came across a problem in a Windows 7 PC where the Windows Search service failed to start, and manually starting the service using Services MMC resulted in Error 1053, with the following error message verbatim.
Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
After upgrading your Windows Vista computer to Windows 7, when you right-click on a JPG/JPEG image and click Edit, the following error message may appear:
There was a problem starting C:\Program Files\Windows Photo Gallery\PhotoViewer.dll
The specified module could not be found.
In Windows 7, three new commands are added to the Desktop right-click menu namely, Screen Resolution, Gadgets and Personalize. This article tells you how to rename the Screen Resolution entry. "But what’s the point of renaming the entry?" you may ask. (more…)
Until last week I was thinking that increasing the taskbar thumbnail window size is not possible natively in Windows 7 (and Windows Vista). Well! Windows 7 supports the ability to increase the thumbnail preview size natively, through registry edits which I’m covering in this article.
This is how the taskbar thumbnail preview window appeared prior to applying the following edit.
When logged on to an administrator account in a Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC and attempt to merge a .REG file, you’ll see the User Account Control (UAC) prompt asking for your consent to allow the process to start. Regedit.exe uses the highestavailable execution level (as specified in its manifest) and thus it prompts for consent to launch with the highest available privilege.
I’m writing this article specifically for Windows 7, because the FullRowSelect registry value that you used in Windows Vista, doesn’t work in Windows 7. (REF: Enable or Disable Full Row Select feature in Explorer in Windows Vista). After some of our readers reported that setting FullRowSelect to 0 doesn’t do anything in Windows 7, I decided to have a look at this issue. Playing with different bitmask values, I finally got what I wanted – to disable full row select feature in Windows Explorer (Details mode) in Windows 7, but with a minor side-effect which is explained in the later part of the article. (more…)
