For those of you that have an OCD for ‘cleanliness’ on your desktop, here’s one for you!

To put the recycle bin on the taskbar in Windows 7 is very easy.

 

 

First thing is to make a new folder on the desktop.

Inside of that folder put a shortcut to the recycle bin (just drag & drop the bin to the folder)

Put the new folder with the recycle bin shortcut to somewhere off the desktop (my documents or similar)

Then, right-click the taskbar and unlock it.

Right-click again and navigate to ‘Toolbars’ > ‘New Toolbar’

Choose the folder with the recycle bin shortcut is.

You’ll notice is has two sliders either side of it, right click the slider on the left and uncheck ‘Show Text’ & ‘Show Title’.  Right-click the same slider and go to the top of the menu to ‘View’, check ‘Large Icons’.  If you’re happy with the recycle bin on the right hand side of the taskbar then you’re done.  If you’d prefer it to be on the far left hand side of the taskbar, read on!

Next to the Start Orb on the taskbar there will be a separator.  Click, hold and drag that separator downwards, the bin will now be on the left.  Drag the separator to the right & up.  Right-click the taskbar again, make sure the taskbar is locked.

To hide the recycle bin from the desktop, right-click the desktop and go to personalise (at the bottom), in the left-hand pane at the top click on ‘Change Desktop Icons’, uncheck the recycle bin, apply, OK, and that’s it!!

Microsoft have released an amazing feature in Windows 7.  It’s the ability to run an XP SP3 Virtual Machine natively within the OS.

Here’s a basic tour.

 

You’ll need a specific processor to run it, although most modern PC’s will cope!

See here for info on what Intel and AMD processors will work.

Now, whilst it has it’s limitations, it’s very good for a beta.

When you ’X’ it, the virtual PC will hibernate, meaning that you can quickly boot and shutdown the virtual OS.  This, of course can be changed by going to Tools, Settings.

 

 

With out messing with it, you have access to all of your other drives.  Very handy indeed!  It can be a little slow accessing the drives and sometimes does take patience to get to say, the resource folder in your ‘normal’ C drive.

 

 

You can easily attach and detach, share and un-share other devices that are on your primary OS.  Such as wireless devices, Bluetooth devices and USB devices.

 

 

 

By default, the RAM is set to 256MB, by now I’d have thought that most PC’s can bump that up to at least 512MB, maybe more!

To access the settings, first you must make sure that the virtual machine isn’t hibernating/sleeping, and is completely turned off.  You can then navigate to (in my case, yours will differ)

A:\Users\Home\Virtual Machines

Then you can right click the virtual machine you wish to change the settings on and set your preferences.

 

 

I must admit, I’ve had a few issues with networking that I’m currently trying to fix.  You do however, need to remind yourself that this is a Beta and probably won’t be out of this stage until Windows 7 is finally released.

The Virtual PC is also surprisingly light on resources.  Where as VMware or similar will hog most of your processor and RAM, take a look at this screenshot and see for your self.  Within the Virtual PC i was running IE, WMP, Firefox and Windows Blinds.

 

 

Overall i think MS have done a very good job of this.  Hopefully they will include it in the final release of Windows 7.

Here’s the download link for everything you need to use it in Windows 7

 

I’m sure many of you have come across mintywhite.com by now.  For those of you that haven’t…shame on you!

Anyhoo, here’s a wallpaper i made using Photoshop CS4, i hadn’t seen any wallpapers for that site like others do, so i thought i’d try and change that

 

Here it is;