Restoring lost icons on Windows 7 Task Bar

For the last few days I’ve been annoyed that some of my application icons have been ‘lost’, reverting to some default system icon.

This was particularily prevalent for applications pinned to the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Most detail I found involves rebooting the computer, but I tried a slightly different approach just now and it has worked fine, without the need for rebooting. My applications icons are now restored

To restore the application icons using the same process, do the following:

1. Press and Hold the “Window Key” and press “R” (and then release both!)
2. type “cmd” and press “Enter”
3. type “taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F” [ Warning, may cause problems although it was fine for me. Also, if you are not worried about rebooting your system, you may skip this step and reboot after step 6 instead ]
4. type “del /a %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db“
5. type “explorer.exe“
6. type “exit“

You’re icons should now be restored. If anything goes wrong - and it hasn’t for me – then just reboot.

You can press “CTRL_ALT_DEL” to get a task manager, and from there you can either reboot, or again try to run explorer.exe

Snap windows to an area of the screen in XP, Vista just like on Windows 7

On Windows 7 I very quickly got used to use the widow snap feature.

You can hold the windows-key and then use the direction keys to snap the window to the side of the screen, and it takes up half of your real-estate. I am ofter comparing window content so I find being easily able to quickly have each window take up half the screen to be very useful.

Back on my XP machine I missed this a lot, but thanks to one of the guys at work, I found out about Winsplit Revolution [ http://www.winsplit-revolution.com ] which he uses on Vista.

This little app offers a lot more options for snapping your windows not just to a side of the screen taking up 1/2 of it each, but also to the corners (1/4 screen use) and even into two rows of three small windows. This all in seconds, with a nice use of the numpad/arrows to easily and quickly select where in the screen you want the window to go (7 for top left, 3 for bottom right, etc).

It starts automatically on boot, and sits nice and quietly in the system tray, out of the way.

It really is the little things that make the big differences, and once you start using this app you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Check out their demo video at http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/screenshots/videos-demos

Hibernation Woes – Sleep after Hibernate on Windows 7

I have a laptop (Dell Studio 1557) that I have set to go into hibernation when the lid of the laptop is closed.

I have been annoyed for the last while that when I turn on the computer to resume from hibernate, it would immediately shutdown again, but this time in sleep mode.

Today I had a look at the power options, and saw that sleep was set to occur automatically after a number of hours, specific timing depending on whether it was being powered by the mains or battery at the time.

I have disabled automatic sleep and hibernated the computer. This time, when I resume from hibernate, the computer no longer goes into sleep mode. I would have assumed that waking from hibernate would have reset the sleep count-down, but obviously not. Perhaps this will be fixed in a patch sometime ?