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Saturday, 6 January 2007
Has any other Windows XP user had their file explorer stubbornly refuse to remember their custom folder settings and revert to pretty “icon” view instead? One thing which has bugged me was that even when I change my current folder view to “details” and then click on the “apply to all folders” button, Windows XP still continues to open some folders in “icons” view.
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Wednesday, 27 December 2006
Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach.
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Saturday, 16 December 2006
If your corporate “standard operating environment” precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here’s an alternative way of doing it:
Open up a command shell window by clicking on the “Start” button and selecting the “Run” menu option. Export the ThemeManager registry key by typing in
REG EXPORT "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager" THEME.REG
(all on one line) in the command shell. This will create a text file called “THEME.REG” which you will edit in the next step. Edit the file you just created by typing in
START NOTEPAD THEME.REG
in the command shell and change the subkey ColorName from NormalColor to either HomeStead or Metallic, depending on whether you want an olive or silver theme. Import your changes back into the registry by typing in
REG IMPORT THEME.REG in the command shell.
You will need to log off and back on again for the changes to take affect.
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
Having recently decided to get serious about managing my personal finances, I started to look around for something which had all the important features but didn’t require an accounting degree to use. Essentially, I was after a simple application which would enable me to track my spending habits to see where all the money goes.
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Thursday, 16 November 2006
I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function.
The short answer is “yes, there is”. The actual VB6 code required isn’t all that much but you’ll have to call the Windows API to do it. Put the following code into a module and name it something meaningful:
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