Windows Media Center is a nice application for managing and displaying your personal photos, but you may occasionally need to make some basic edits to your pictures. Today we’ll take a look at how to crop, edit, and print photos right from Windows 7 Media Center.

From within the Picture Library in Windows Media Center, choose a photo to work with, right-click and select Picture Details. You can also access this option with a Media Center remote by clicking the “i” button. Note: You’ll notice you have the option to rotate the picture from this menu. It is also available on the next screen.?

Rotate a picture

Now you’ll see more options on the Picture Details screen. From here you can rotate, Print, or Touch Up, Delete, or Burn a CD/DVD. To rotate the picture, simple select Rotate. Note: If you want your photo saved with the new orientation, you’ll need to select Save from the Touch Up screen that we will look at later in the article.

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Each click will rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise. You’ll see the new orientation of the picture displayed on the Picture Details screen after you have clicked Rotate.

Print a picture

From the Picture Details screen, select Print.

Click Print again. Media Center automatically prints to your default printer, so make sure your desired target printer is set as default.

Crop and Edit Photos

To edit or crop your photo, select Touch Up.

Touch Up options includes, Crop, Contrast, and Red Eye removal. First, we’ll select the Crop button to crop our photo.

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You will see a cropping area overlay appear on your photo.

Select one of the buttons below to adjust the location, size, and orientation of the area to be cropped.

When you’re happy with your selection, click Save.

You’ll be prompted to confirm your save. Click Yes to permanently save your edits.

You can also apply Contrast or Red Eye adjustments to your photos. There aren’t any advanced settings for these options. You merely toggle the Contrast or Red Eye on or off by selecting the option.

Be sure to click Save before exiting to if you’ve made any changes you wish to permanently apply to the photos. This includes rotating the images.

While this method is not likely to be replace your favorite image editing software, it does give you the ability to make basic edits and print photos directly from Windows Media Center. With a Media Center remote, you can even do all your edits from the comfort of your recliner.

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If you like to tweak and customize IE with Add-ons and changing settings, sometimes you may have problems with stability. To save time, you can reset all of the IE settings rather than trying to troubleshoot individual areas.

Reset IE Settings

To reset Internet Explorer Settings, click on Tools then Internet Options. When you reset the settings, you won’t lose personal settings like your homepage, search provider, passwords…etc.

The Internet Options screen opens…click on the Advanced tab, then under Reset Internet Explorer settings click on the Reset button.

You’ll need to verify that you want to reset all Internet Explorer Settings. If you choose to, you can delete all of your personal settings as well, but it shouldn’t be necessary to fix stability issues.

The settings will start to reset, and when it’s finished close out of the message box.

For the process to complete you’ll need to restart Internet Explorer.

When it restarts you’ll be presented with the Welcome screen where you can go through the setup wizard again.

After it’s complete, you should be back in business and can start using IE again.

With the new enhancements and features available in Internet Explorer 8, sometimes too much tweaking can cause it to stop working. One area you could start with is troubleshooting IE 8 Add-ons. However, if you don’t want to waste time troubleshooting each potential issue, sometimes it’s just easier to reset things back to how they were originally.

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The new Windows 7 taskbar’s Aero Peek feature, with the live thumbnails of every window, is awesome… but sometimes you just want to be able to click the taskbar button and have the last open window show up instead. Here’s a quick hack to make it work better.

To better understand the problem, imagine having nine windows of the same type open on your screen, but you are primarily working in just one of the windows at a time. So every time you want to switch back, you have to click the taskbar button, and then choose the one you are using from the list, which can be pretty annoying…

Now if you know your Windows 7 shortcuts, you’d know that you can simply hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the taskbar button, and the last window will show up. In fact, you can keep holding down the Ctrl key and keep clicking, and Windows will cycle through the open windows. It’s a useful shortcut, but hardly something you want to do every single time.

Instead, we’ll use a quick registry hack to make the normal click switch to the last open window—if you still want to see the thumbnail list, just hover your mouse over the button for half a second to see the full list.

Manual Registry Hack for Last Active Window

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then head down to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced

Once you’re there, create a new 32-bit DWORD value on the right hand side, give it the name LastActiveClick, and set the value to 1. Once you are done, it should look something like this:

Once you are done, you’ll have to log off and back on, or you can kill Explorer.exe through Task Manager and re-open it.

Download the Registry Hack Instead

Since you probably don’t feel like registry hacking, we’ve provided you an easy downloadable version. You can simply download the file, extract it, and then double-click on the LastActiveClick.reg file. Once you are done, you’ll have to log off and back on, just like with the manual registry hack.

Download LastActiveClick Registry Hack from howtogeek.com

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If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably noticed the .recently-used.xbel file in the root of your User folder, and you’re wondering why it keeps constantly coming back even though you repeatedly delete it.

So What Is It?

The quick answer is that it’s part of the GTK+ library used by a number of cross-platform applications, perhaps the most well-known of which is the Pidgin instant messenger client.

As the name implies, the file is used to store a list of the most recently used files. In the case of Pidgin, this comes into play when you are transferring files over IM, and that’s when the file will appear again.

Note: this is actually a known and reported bug in Pidgin, but sadly the developers aren’t terribly responsive when it comes to annoyances. Pidgin seems to go for long periods of time without any updates, but we still use it because it’s open-source, cross-platform, and works well.

How Do I Get Rid of It?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to easily get rid of it, apart from using a different application. If you need to transfer files over Pidgin, the file is going to re-appear… but there’s a quick workaround!

The general idea is to set the file properties to Hidden and Read-only. You’d think you could just set it to Hidden and be done with it, but Pidgin will re-create the file every time, so instead we’re leaving the file there and preventing it from being accessed.

You could also totally remove access through the Security tab if you wanted to, but this worked fine for me… as you can see, no more file in the folder.

Of course, you can’t have the show hidden files and folders option turned on, or the file will continue to show up. Want to get really geeky? You can toggle hidden files with a shortcut key.

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If you are a Star Trek fan then doubtless you have a favorite series and starship(s) that you love. Get ready to enjoy viewing the fleet of ships that we have gathered together for you in our Star Trek Wallpaper collection.

Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution.

Note: This particular wallpaper can be trimmed up height-wise to fit your monitor’s size very nicely.

For more fun wallpapers be certain to visit our new Desktop Fun section. Looking for some great icons to go with your new Star Trek wallpaper? Then be certain to check out our Sci-Fi Icon Packs collection here.

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Looking for a way to display song lyrics in Windows Media Player? Today we look at a very simple method to accomplish this with Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player.

Download and run the Lyrics Plugin install. (See download link below) When the installation is finished you’ll be prompted to run Windows Media Player. Click Yes.

Begin playing your song or playlist then switch to Now Playing mode.

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You should now see the full song lyrics of the currently playing track.

To toggle the lyrics on and off, select Tools from the Menu in Library view, choose Plug-ins, and click Lyrics Plugin.

If you don’t see the Menu bar, you can enable it by going to Organize, Layout, and Show Menu Bar.

When Lyrics Plugin is turned off, Windows Media Player will switch back to it’s default visualization.

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Whether you just want to know the lyrics or you’d like to hone your karaoke chops, Lyrics Plugin makes a nice addition to Windows Media Player 12.

Download Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player 12.

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It’s a right-centric world, with everything from pencils to computer mice expecting you to be right-handed.? Here’s how you can train your mouse and cursors in Windows 7 and Vista to respect your left-handedness.

Using your Left Hand the Right Way

It’s easy to switch your mouse to left-handed mode.? Enter “mouse” in your Start menu search, and select the first entry.

Check the “Switch primary and secondary buttons” box to make your mouse more left-hand friendly.? Now your primary select button is your right button, and the secondary button (commonly referred to as right-click) is the left button.

But, it can still be awkward to select items on screen with your left hand using the default cursors.? MSDN has a free set of cursors designed for left-handed users, that can fix this problem for you.? These cursors are exactly like the default Aero cursors in Windows 7 and Vista, except they are reversed to make them better for left-handed use.

The cursors are available in 3 sizes: normal, large, and extra large.? The normal ones are the same size as the default ones in Windows 7; feel free to choose the other sizes if you prefer them.? Click each link to download all 6 cursors for your size (link below).

Click “I Agree” after selecting the cursors to accept the license agreement and download them.

Once you have all 6 cursors downloaded, select the Pointers tab in the Mouse Properties dialog.? Click the cursor to change, and then click Browse to select the new cursor.

Browse to the folder you downloaded your new cursors to, select the correct cursor, and click Open.

Do this for each of the 6 cursors to be changed.? Strangely, the Busy cursor (the spinning blue orb) is a static cursor, so you may not wish to change it.? All the other ones look and act like their standard counterparts.

Here’s the cursors to be changed, and their equivalents in the default cursors:

After changing all the cursors, click Save As… to save this mouse scheme so you can easily select it in the future.? Finally click Ok to close the Mouse Properties dialog and accept the changes.

Now your pointers will be easier to use left-handed!

Conclusion

Whether you’re right-handed or left-handed, you can enjoy the Aero cursors in Windows 7 or Vista in the way that works best for you.? Unfortunately, many mice are still designed for right-handed people, but this trick will help you make the best out of your mouse.

We included all of the 6 cursors for you in a zip file you can download Here. This will make it easier for you to get them all together without having to download them individually.

Link

Download Left-Handed Mouse Pointers from MSDN

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If you’re doing any work with networking, you probably need to know the name of your computer. Rather than diving into Control Panel, there’s a really simple way to do this from the command prompt.

Note: If you haven’t already, be sure to read our complete guide to networking Windows 7 with XP and Vista.

To see the hostname… all you have to do is type hostname at the command prompt. Go figure, eh?

The same thing works in Linux or OS X, though you can see that most of the time the hostname is part of the prompt anyway. Note: you can also change the hostname by simply typing “hostname ”.

Of course, the easiest way to see your computer name in Windows is to just hit the Win+Break key combination, which will pop up the System pane from Control Panel.

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If you want to change it instead, you can always change your computer name easily through Control Panel.

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If you have to deal with a lot of spreadsheets, you’re probably really bored right now. You also might be wondering how to turn a row into a column, or a column into a row. Here’s how to do it with Google Docs Spreadsheets.

If you’re an Excel user, you’re also in luck, because we’ve already shown you how to turn a row into a column, or vice-versa. It won’t make you any less bored though.

Convert a Row to a Column (or backwards)

The first thing you’ll need is a column or a row of information that you want to convert into the opposite. For our example, we’ve got this set of data that we created by using the Auto Fill options in Google Docs.

Now in another cell, you’ll need to use the TRANSPOSE function, which you can use by simply typing in the following:

=TRANSPOSE(

And then selecting the cells with the mouse, or manually typing in the range of cells you want to copy. The final function in this example was:

=TRANSPOSE(A1:A11)

Finish it off with the final ) character to complete the function, hit the Enter key, and there we are… the column was transposed over to the right.

You can use the same thing to turn columns into rows, or rows into columns—just change the range you are looking for.

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If you want to send an email to a contact or several contacts, you might want to keep some of the recipient email addresses private using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) Field. Here’s how to do it in Outlook 2010.

It’s not enabled by default, but adding it as a field for all future emails is a simple process.

Launch Outlook and under the Home tab click on the New E-mail button.

When the new mail window opens click on the Options tab and in the Show Fields column select Bcc.

The Bcc field will appear and you can then put the contacts in there who you want to receive the mail secretly or don’t want to show a certain email address.

Now anytime you compose a message, the Bcc field is included. For more on the Bcc field check out the blog post from Mysticgeek – Keep Your Email Contacts Private.

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