So there’s two ways of opening files in Notepad: either you open Notepad and then open the file or you simply double-click on a file and it opens using Notepad. In this article, I’ll try to cover the different ways you can run Notepad as administrator to make your life easier, especial if you have to edit a lot of system files.

Notepad as Administrator Shortcut

If you tend to open Notepad and then open the files you have to edit, then you can create a shortcut so that Notepad will open in administrator mode automatically without having to right-click and choose Run as Administrator. That’s always one way to do it, but if you have to do that a hundred times, it can get frustrating.

So first right-click on the desktop and choose New – Shortcut.

When the new shortcut dialog appears, click on the Browse button.

Next, expand Computer, then Local Disk (C:), then Windows and then choose notepad.

Click Ok and then click Next. Give your shortcut a name and then click Finish.

Now right-click on the new shortcut on your desktop and choose Properties.

Now click on the Shortcut tab and then click on the Advanced button.

Finally, check the Run as Administrator check box and click OK.

Whew! Kind of a long process for something so simple. Anyway, now whenever you click on that shortcut, it will open Notepad as Administrator. Not too bad, but this still doesn’t solve the problem of wanting to directly open a file without having to open Notepad first.

Add Open Notepad as Administrator to Right-Click Context Menu

The best way to solve the second problem is to add an option to the right-click context menu that will open the file in Notepad as administrator. This is not very hard to do, but requires a few steps. Firstly, you need to enable the built-in Administrator account in Windows 7. I won’t write all the steps here, but will simply link to a tutorial that explains it step by step:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/507-built-administrator-account-enable-disable.html?filter

Next, log out of your current account and then log into the Administrator account. At this time, it should have no password. Now go to Start, Control Panel and choose Create a password for your account.

Once you have chosen a password, we need to open the registry editor by going to Start and typing in regedit in the search box. Then navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\

Now right-click on shell and choose New – Key.

Name the key the following without the quotes “Open with Notepad (as Administrator)“. Now select the newly created key and create another key called “command“. Finally, right-click on the (Default) value in the right-hand pane and choose Modify.

Change the value to the following:

runas /savecred /user:HOSTNAME\Administrator “notepad %1″

Note two things here. Firstly, you need to keep the quotes around the “notepad %1″ section. Secondly, you need to change HOSTNAME to the name of your computer. You can figure that out by going to Start, Control Panel and click on System.

So this is what mine looks like after everything:

Now, you should be able to right-click on any text file and you’ll see the Open with Notepad (as Administrator) option.

The first time you do this, you’ll be prompted for the password that you created for the Administrator account.

You won’t have to type it again because it’ll save the credentials. The only problem with this context menu shortcut is that the command prompt appears for a split second before opening Notepad. It’s not a big deal for me since it’s so much nicer to be able to open any text file as with Notepad in Administrator mode without having to open Notepad and then open the file by browsing for it. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to comment! Enjoy!

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It’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with it. But sometimes a change is good so in this article we’ll show you how to change the background image behind the login screen to anything you want.

The first step is to open up the Start Menu by clicking the orb in the lower left corner of the screen.

Now, in the Start Menu search box, type regedit, to open up the Registry Editor.

When the Registry Editor appears in the Start Menu, click the Enter key to launch it. You should see a window like this.

Now, right-click on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder, and choose the Find option.

The search window will appear so perform a search for OEMBackground.

It will eventually be found under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background (you could navigate there directly, but the search function is probably quicker than typing all that into the path bar.

Note: it’s possible that OEMBackground doesn’t exist on your system; if this is the case, adding a new DWORD value with the name of OEMBackground will fix things.

Once you can see the OEMBackground entry, double click to reveal its properties, and change the value from 0 (the default) to 1 (which will allow us – or the computer’s OEM as intended – to change the login screen background).

Once this is finished you can close the Registry Editor and open up Windows Explorer. We want to go to %windir%\system32\oobe, so enter that into the path bar.

You’ll now need to create an info folder (all lowercase), and then a new folder, named backgrounds (also lowercase), inside the info folder. Depending on your computer’s OEM, you may find these folders already exist and may already have images in them, placed there by Dell or HP or IBM, etc.

Now simply select a favorite wallpaper. It should be in JPG format and less than 245 KB in size (and ideally the exact dimensions of your display to avoid stretching). Name this image backgroundDefault.jpg and place it in the backgrounds folder.

You can now restart, lock your screen or logout to see your new login screen.

Congratulations! This isn’t the simplest process, and isn’t as simple as using a program like Windows 7 Logon Background Changer, but if you want to get into the particulars regarding what programs like that are doing, this is a good way to go, if a bit more complex.

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In addition to the normal WiFi network, there was also a Wireless Network Connection 2 and the adapter name was “Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter”. I had never seen this before so it made me very curious. After some reading, I learned it’s a new feature in Windows 7 and it actually can let you do some pretty cool stuff with your wireless network card.

In this article, I’ll explain what the virtual WiFi mini port adapter is and how you can use it on your Windows 7 PC. Apparently, this is a feature that is still in beta and therefore you won’t find very much official documentation on how to use it.

Basically, Virtual WiFi is a technology that virtualizes your network adapter much in the same way VMWare virtualizes your entire operating system. Once virtualized, you can basically convert one physical wireless adapter into two virtual ones. This allows you to then connect one virtual network adapter to your regular wireless network and use the other virtual adapter to connect to another network such as an ad-hoc network or to create a WiFi hotspot and allow other to connect to your Windows 7 machine wireless like they would connect to a normal wireless access point.

To play around with creating your own wireless access point, you can go about it in two ways: use the command line in Windows 7 or download a third party program that provides a nice GUI interface and some extra features. I’ll show you how to use both. If you’re a little tech-savvy, I would suggest you use the command line.

Setup Wireless Access Point using Command Line

The first thing you can to do is share the Internet connection on your main network adapter so that when people connect using the virtual network adapter, they will be able to access the Internet through your Windows 7 computer. You can do this by going to Network and Sharing Center and clicking on Change Adapter Settings. Click on the Sharing tab and check the box that says Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.

In the drop-down under Home networking connection, make sure to pick the name of the virtual WiFi mini port adapter. It may be something like Wireless Network Connection 2 or 3, etc. Now to setup the wireless access point on the virtual network adapter, open the command prompt (Start, type run) and type in the following command:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=VirtualNetworkName  key=Password

In the line above, you need to change VirtualNetworkName to the desired name of your wireless network and change Password to whatever password you want on the network. Note that all virtual wireless access points have to use WPA2-PSK (AES) encryption no matter what. Once it has been setup, you can enable it by typing in the following line:

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

To see details about the hosted network, such as how many clients are connected, type in the following command:

netsh wlan show hostednetwork

And that’s about it! Other users should now be able to see your newly created wireless access point in their list of wireless networks. They should also be able to connect and connect to the Internet.

If that was all too much work for you, then you can use a third party app.

Setup Wireless Access Point using Connectify

If you travel a lot or end up somewhere where you have to connect an Ethernet cable to your computer to connect to the Internet and you don’t feel like fooling around with the command prompt, you can always check out a program called Connectify to do the work for you.

http://www.connectify.me/

This little app has a free and a Pro version. If you just want to share an Internet connection on Windows 7, then the free version is perfectly fine. The pro version has a bunch of other features, which might be useful depending on your needs, otherwise I suggest not buying pro.

Once installed, you just name your network, type a password, and choose the Internet connection to share. Sounds similar to what we did above right? Connectify just provides a nice interface for doing the same thing.

So now you know what the Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter is and hopefully you’ll find it useful! If not, you can always disable it by going to the Control Panel, Device Manager and disabling it under Network Controllers. Enjoy!

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It becomes a bit busy, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, turning off this behavior is a simple process.  The first step is to find a blank spot on the taskbar, and right-click it, to bring up a contextual menu.  When the menu appears, select the Properties option, found at the very bottom.

The Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window will appear.  This windows gives you all sorts of options about how the Taskbar and Start Menu behave, but what extra toolbars might also be available on the Taskbar, in addition to other options.

Since we’re looking to modify the Start Menu’s behavior, go ahead and click to view the Start Menu tab.

Now click the Customize button.

A new window – the Customize Start Menu window – will now appear.  Here we can change whether certain items appear as links or as menus (the Control Panel entry, for instance, can either open the control panel or show a list of all available control panels, without needing to visit the main control panel).

The listing is alphabetical, so scroll down a bit until you reach the entry (it should be enabled by default, named Highlight newly installed programs, an entry we want to uncheck in order to turn off this feature.

Once this checkbox is unchecked, simply click the OK button at the bottom of the Customize Start Menu window.

Now, simply click the Apply button to save this change, and any others you may have made.

You’re finished!  Simply dismiss the Properties window, and the next time you add a new program, it should just appear as another Start Menu entry, without any additional highlighting.

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To access this report, first open up the Command Prompt. You can find this in the Start Menu, in the Accessories folder.

This report, however, needs to be run as an administrator, so instead of clicking as normal, right-click, then choose the Run As Administrator option.

Once you’ve clicked Yes to allow the process to run (not shown), the Command Prompt window will appear.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you are running this application as the Administrator, so be careful. You can do damange to your system as the Administrator, although our usage will be quite harmless.

To run the energy report, type powercfg -energy then hit the Enter key.

As you can see from the updates, this report will take a minute or so.

When the report has finished, you can see if there were any errors (there were 0 errors in the report generated above), plus any warnings (only the one), and general information. You’ll also notice that your report has been generated as a simple HTML file. It should be located in the System32 folder, which is inside the Windows folder (located at the root level of your hard drive). The report will be named “energy-report.html” (although you may note see the “.html” if your system is configured to hide file extensions.

Now simply double-click this report to view it in your web browser.

This report will tell us quite a few things about our system’s power saving settings. It shows us where there are problem areas, as well as information that could help us make an informed decision regarding settings that could save energy, and thereby produce better battery life.

The one warning given in this report tells us that our Power Policy for our 802.11 radio (or wireless card), is not configured for low-power mode, which means that when we’re using wireless and running on battery power, we’ll likely use up more energy than necessary because of the wireless card.

Another piece of information users will find helpful is battery life information. Located directly below the CPU Utilization entry in our report is Battery Information.

This doesn’t tell us how long to expect our battery to last but the overall capacity of our battery. In the screenshot above you can see the capacity the battery is designed for, and what it attained during its last charge. Dividing the last full charge by the battery’s designed capacity (48107/48840 in our case), and multiplying that number by 100 gives us a percentage. In our instance, the number is 98.499, telling us that our battery is still able to charge up to almost 98.5 percent of its original capacity (which is good, since the laptop is only a couple months old!).

There are many other bits of info laptop users may find useful in this report. You’ll see what types of sleep states your computer is capable of (likely “sleep” and “hibernate” but possibly others), as well as whether Adaptive Display Brightness is supported. Many of these power settings don’t show up by default in the standard Power Settings control panel, however. Instead, you’ll need to navigate there, click the Change Plan Settings option for your power plan, then finally click the Change Advanced Power Settings option.

This, finally, will bring up the Advanced Power Settings window.

There are many valuable settings here (including the 802.11 power plan mentioned earlier), that should help battery-conscious laptop users squeeze every extra minute of use out of their computer as possible.

As mentioned, running the power report won’t “fix” anything at all. It will tell you what’s wrong, if anything, and areas where you can improve, but ultimately, it’s up to you.

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