Menu Viewer – Right Click To Get Thumbnail Of An Image

Today I’m shaing a free utility, Menu Viewer, that brings up a thumbnail view of an image when it is right-clicked. These days with everyone having a digital camera, we take random pictures of each and every ocaasion and after a period of time it becomes difficult to remember which image was stored where and when.

Using Menu Viewer you can just right-click an image and get its thumbnail view in the context menu. Not only that it also shows useful information like resolution and dimension of the file. Double clicking on the preview mode will open the actual image as usual.

Menu Viewer is compatible with almost all image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and even some rarely heard format types like DDS,HDR, ICO, IFF, JBIG, JNG, KOALA, LBM, Kodak PhotoCD, MNG, PCX, PBM, PGM, PPM, PhotoShop , Raw Fax G3, SGI, Sun, RAS, TARGA, WBMP and many more. All you have to do is just download, install and you are ready to use it directly. Menu Viewer is a tiny software, it occupies only 700 KB, but yet a useful utility that will definitely enhance the context menu functionality for more effective viewing of your favourite images.

Get Back Your Lost Pendrive or other USB devices

These days USB devices or pen drives like they are commonly called, have become an essential tool in our daily buisness, be it in college or at work. Thinking of losing a pendrive that has some important data or your work material can give you a nightmare. Today I’m sharing with you a software that can help in tracing your pendrive, if it ever gets lost.
USB Lost and Found is a free tool to keep your USB drive away from unauthorized users from using/keeping your USB drive. It works on Windows 2000/XP/Server/Vista.
USB Lost and Found has two methods of telling unauthorized users to return it. The first method is the Message method. If you lose your pendrive and someone else tries to use it they get a message box on their computer screens that tells them to return it, along with your contact information, and denies access to the USB drive.

The second method, which only comes with the Pro version, is called Lock Down. Lock Down immediately locks the user’s computer when the USB drive is accessed, covering the whole screen and denying access. When the computer is in lockdown mode, hotkeys such as Alt+F4 and Ctrl+Shift+Esc don’t work. Only Ctrl+Alt+Del would work and you can shutdown/restart/logoff your computer.

When you’ve installed the lockdown protection on your USB flash drive, you can continue accessing your USB flash drive with any of the following methods below.If you want the Lock Down feature, you’ll have to purchase the PRO version of USB Lost and Found. In my opinion, the lock down feature might work well for a naive user but not on more experienced users. If the computer has autorun turned off or security products such as USB Firewall or iKill installed, USB Lost and Found will not work. Some antivirus may even warn and stop the autorun.inf from your USB flash drive.

So the best thing one can do is use the free version and add our own custom message like,”This USB drive is lost! Please contact: +91XXXXXXXXXX so that I may get my USB drive back! Thank you so much!”. You can also give your Email ID instead of your phone number and hope that there are kind and honest people in this world that would return your USB flash drive to the respective owner.
Click Here To Download USB Lost and Found.

How to Disable Autorun Feature

In one my previous posts, I had mentioned about a freeware called Media Desktop that helps you to access your USB device directly from the desktop. I got several comments asking me as to why we need such a software when you can already access your USB device by the autoplay option, prompting you to choose an action, in Windows. There are two reasons to this.

Firstly, the autoplay feature pops up only for the first time that you insert your USB device. Once you close a window that displays the contents of your USB device, you can’t access it again directly from your desktop.

Secondly, the autoplay feature in windows is faciliated by the autorun.inf file that exists in your USB device. As already mentioned in many other blogs and forums, it is always advisable to keep the autorun feature disabled in your PC. The autorun feature, which is actually for the convenience of the user, gives viruses, trojans and other malicious stuffs a backdoor entry to your PC without the user having any idea about it.
So for all those who are still not aware as to how to the disable Autorun feature, follow these steps and Autorun feature will no longer be executed automatically.

1. Go to Start> Run and type regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER> Software> Microsoft> Windows> CurrentVersion> Policies> Explorer

3. There you’ll find a value “”NoDriveTypeAutoRun”. Double click on it and set the Hex value to “ff” or the Decimal value to “255″.
4. Refresh the registry editor (press F5) and you’re done.

Change Mouse Settings for Left-Hand Users

By default, most computer mouses are desinged for the convenience of right-hand users. They are designed in a way that the index finger, being the more powerful digit, is used for the left-click button and the right-click button, which is rarely used, is done by the middle finger. Left hand users might however find this difficult and most left handers I know, are forced to use the mouse right handed.

For all those lefties who aren’t aware, a small change to the mouse settings can help you convert the mouse to suit you.

To converting to Left Hand Mouse in Windows..

• Go to Start Menu.
• Click on Settings and select Control Panel.
• Double click on the Mouse icon to display the Mouse Properties.
• Select the Buttons tab and click on the check box marked “Switch primary and secondary buttons” to set the mouse buttons up for left-handed use.
• Click OK or press Enter.

Note that the buttons of the mouse now gets reversed. If you’re operating from Windows 95, 98, ME or Windows 2000, you’ll be prompted to make a selection (Right-handed or Left-handed) from the Buttons tab, instead of a checkbox. Just click and select accordingly, and you’re done. Hope all the lefties out their find this tip useful.

Access Your Pen-Drive Directly From Desktop

Today I’d like to share a very small utility called Desktop Media that any average PC user will find useful.
Every time we insert a USB or any other flash drive to the PC, to access it we have to first click on My Computer, search for that particular drive and then click on it. This might sometimes turn out to be tedious and troublesome when we are in hurry or have some important work to be done.
Using Desktop Media you can directly access the contents of the USB device. Desktop Media automatically creates a shortcut icon onto the desktop every time a USB is connected to the PC. By clicking on it you can directly access the USB the same way you otherwise would. Also, if you connect more than one USB, it will list all of them on the desktop. This can save your time which becomes precious when your in a hurry. Desktop Media occupies only 354KB and once you install it there’s nothing else to be done. So hope you all find this useful.

Click Here to Download

6 Month Anniversary Giveaway – Wordshare Office recovery

This week it’s the 6-month anniversary of my website, TechQuest.  As part of this small acheivement I’d like to give away free liecence to a very useful software, Wondershare Office Recovery.
Wondershare Office Recovery is a new powerful recovery tool specially designed for recovering MS-Office files and PDF files even after you have formatted your PC (Yes!! that’s true). This software is a must-have for all those who work on MS-Office as part of their job. It can recover DOC, PPT, XLS, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, PST, DBX, ACCDB, MPP, PUB, ONE, XSN and files lost due to accidental deletion, formatting, viruses, bad sectors, misuse of partition tools and so forth.

Its best features are:

• Easy 3-step to recover lost files. Select, scan and recover without special technical skills
• Restore lost office files and PDF files due to intentional deletion/formatting/virus attacks and other reasons
• Recover lost files from various storage devices including PC hard drive, external hard drive, memory stick, USB flash disk, DVD and more
• Recovery result won’t affect the original file format and layout

The normal price of Wondershare Office Recovery is about $29.95. As part of the 6-month anniversary of my website I’m giving away free license to 50 lucky winners. All you have to do is…
1) Download Wondershare Office Recovery. (Its only 2.80 MB)
2) Write in a comment on my blog and add in your name and Email ID in it. First 50 entries will get the license code via email.
So hurry up and grab your copy now.
Click here to leave your comment.

Convert Windows XP ShutDown Box to Windows 7

It’s been really long time since I’d written my last post. Finally I managed to write something that I’ve been wanting to share from a long time. My previous article was about changing the progress box to that of Windows 7. That article got good comments. This article is something similar to it, so I’m sure it will be intresting.

Windows 7, similar to Vista, doesn’t have any Shutdown/Log Off dialog box like what we have in Windows XP but we can redesign Windows XP default shutdown box to make it look more refreshing like a Windows 7 Shutdown/Log Off dialog box.

Windows XP

Windows 7

To do so,
1) You will need Resource Hacker.

2)A few BMP files will be needed to change the appearance of both Shutdown/Log Off dialog box.
Click here to download BMP files.

3)Extract the file and you’ll get 4 BMPs with the name:
1.bmp

2.bmp

3.bmp

4.bmp

4) Now open “%windir%\System32\Shell32.dll” file in Resource Hacker and then replace following BITMAPs with the mentioned BMP files:

Bitmap -> 14351 -> 1033 with 1.bmp

Bitmap -> 14353 -> 1033 with 2.bmp

Bitmap -> 14354 -> 1033 with 1.bmp

Bitmap -> 14355 -> 1033 with 2.bmp

Bitmap -> 14356 -> 1033 with 3.bmp

5) Now save the file and open %windir%\System32\msgina.dll file in Resource Hacker and then replace following BITMAPs with the mentioned BMP files:

Bitmap -> 20140 -> 1033 with 1.bmp

Bitmap -> 20141 -> 1033 with 2.bmp

Bitmap -> 20142 -> 1033 with 1.bmp

Bitmap -> 20143 -> 1033 with 2.bmp

Bitmap -> 20150 -> 1033 with 4.bmp

Now save the file. That’s it.

6) Now replace the existing shell32.dll and msgina.dll file with the newly created ones. No need to restart.

Get WinRar 3.80 worth $29 for Free!!

WinRAR is one of the most popular archive management software for Windows users. Most of us use the trial versions that works fine but such versions have limited funtionality. Today we can  get WinRAR 3.80, which generally costs $29, absolutely free.

“PC Welt”, a German tech magazine is giving away WinRAR 3.80 copy absolutely free to its readers.
You just need to follow these simple steps to get your free copy:

STEP 1. First download WinRAR 3.80 using following link:
Download WinRAR 3.80

STEP 2. Now go to following page which is a Registration Form and enter your First name, Last name, E-mail address, E-mail address again respectively.
http://covermount.win-rar.com/pcwelt0310/
NOTE: If you are not able to open the above link and get “Please note: This offer is not available in your country!” message, do as following:
a. First open a German proxy site like following:

German Proxy Site

b. Now copy-paste the Registration form URL  http://covermount.win-rar.com/pcwelt0310/ in textbox given at proxy website and press Enter. Now it’ll open the Registration form without any problem.

STEP 3. Click on “Abschicken” button in Registration form and you’ll receive an e-mail from WinRAR team very soon containing a download link to download your free Registration key.

STEP 4: Open the e-mail and click on the 2nd link which should look like as following:
https://covermount.win-rar.com/pcwelt0310/download.php?email=your_email_id

STEP 5: It’ll download a file called “rarreg.rar”, extract it and you’ll get a file “rarreg.key”. Copy this file to WinRAR 3.80 folder.

That’s it. Now you can enjoy the full licensed version of WinRAR 3.80.