Remove Creative Cloud Files from Windows Explorer


I’ve used Photoshop for years and have been using Lightroom.  Both are great products but lately Adobe has been including a link to Creative Cloud Files in Windows Explorer.  I’m not even sure what use it is. Maybe it’s useful for some people but I find it annoying.  Here’s how you remove the link in Windows Explorer.
Run regedit
Find “Creative Cloud Files”
Look for System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree

It’s value is most likely set to 1.  Change it to 0.
Close and re-open Windows Explorer. Creative Cloud Files should be gone.
You might have to reboot.

 

Install prompt on Windows Server 2008 remote desktop launching Outlook 2013

Office-2013-please-wait-while-windows-configures-microsoft-office-64-bit-components-2013

Every time Outlook 2013 is launched on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server through remote desktop this installation screen pops up. I tried uninstalling Office and re-installing it to no avail. After some poking around forums and web searches I ran across a suggestion to install Windows Search under the File services role. This fixed the issue. Open Server Manager and right click File Services under Roles, select add role services and check the Windows Search Service.

Windows 10 disable the lock screen

Windows_10_Logo.svg

I love Windows 10. From the time it was released I’ve felt it was what Windows 8 should have been (and I actually liked Windows 8). There is one feature that’s driven me crazy though. That’s the lock screen. It never stays on what I set it to. You can set it to Windows Spotlight, a single image or slideshow and no matter what machine I use or which of the three settings I pick it changes. Apart from this I never really understood the need for the lock screen.  It just seemed like a way to make you have to push the space button more than needed. So here’s how to turn it off.

Run Regedit
Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
Make a new key and call it Personalization
Make a new DWord 32 Bit Value
Name it NoLockScreen and set it to 1
Reboot

No more wearing out your space bar and no more pictures that don’t stay on what you want them to stay on.

PS. to turn it back on change the value to 0.
Alternatively you can download this text file and rename it to .reg and run it. But if you are like me and don’t trust the internet just do it the manual way above.

Based off instructions found here.

Windows 10 bug – Can’t change IPv4 properties on VPN connection

Capture
For some reason currently when you click the properties button on the IPv4 protocol on a VPN connection in Windows 10, it doesn’t do anything.
I usually go in there and uncheck the “Use default gateway on remote network” setting.
That way my internet bound traffic goes out on my connection and only the traffic meant for the network I’m connected to goes through the VPN connection.
The first computer I tried to make that change on made me think it was just something buggy with that machine. After trying to setup a VPN connection on another computer and getting the same results I figured there was something else going on.

Thankfully you can still change the setting through PowerShell

You can run get-vpnconnection to list your VPN connections and get the name then to set the Gateway setting:

set-vpnconnection -name “Your VPN tunnel name” -SplitTunneling $True

Source: Mike McGruire’s blog

Internet Explorer’s Meet your new browser page keeps coming up

Internet Explorer (version 11 in my case) keeps popping up the “Meet your new browser” page every time I opened the application.
Use these steps to stop it:

  1. GPEDIT.MSC from the Start button search bar
  2. Expand User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer
  3. Double click “Prevent running First Run wizard” (in the right pane)
  4. Set it to Enabled and set Go Directly To Home Page from the drop down.

Windows network locations can show your email address

Opening Windows explorer gave me a bit of a shock when I noticed a device on my network was broadcasting my full email address.  Shock might be a bit dramatic, but I was concerned for sure.  I’d rather not see something like that being broadcast.  Maybe it only shows up on my home network but I don’t like it.  So, after some poking around I found the culprit in the media streaming options.  To get there go to the Network and Sharing Center.

NetworkSharing2

 

Click “Change advanced sharing options.”
Scroll down to the “All Networks” section and click the down arrow.

Advanced

Click the “Choose media sharing options…”
On this screen you will see the email address that was being broadcast as the name of your library.

email

I took this a step further and decided to turn off the media sharing so the devices don’t even show up.  I’m not sharing anything through these devices anyways.  I’d rather turn on the things I want than have them on by default.  In Windows 8 I was able to just tell the machine to leave the homegroup and that made those devices not show up.  Windows 7 devices still showed up.  To get rid of these I had to stop the actual Windows Media Player Network service.  I first tried setting the service to manual but something else kept starting it back up when I rebooted so I disabled it.

Windows 7 problem renaming folders – Could not find this item

My Windows 7 installation started throwing an error every time I created a new folder, renamed a file or tried to move a file.  It would say “Could not find this item.”

Deleting the following registry keys then restarting the explorer.exe process fixed it.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{2112AB0A-C86A-4ffe-A368-0DE96E47012E}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{2112AB0A-C86A-4ffe-A368-0DE96E47012E}\\PropertyBag]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{491E922F-5643-4af4-A7EB-4E7A138D8174}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{491E922F-5643-4af4-A7EB-4E7A138D8174}\\PropertyBag]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{7b0db17d-9cd2-4a93-9733-46cc89022e7c}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{7b0db17d-9cd2-4a93-9733-46cc89022e7c}\\PropertyBag]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{A302545D-DEFF-464b-ABE8-61C8648D939B}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{A302545D-DEFF-464b-ABE8-61C8648D939B}\\PropertyBag]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{A990AE9F-A03B-4e80-94BC-9912D7504104}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\FolderDescriptions\\{A990AE9F-A03B-4e80-94BC-9912D7504104}\\PropertyBag]

Found the solution here.

Windows 7 Tweaks

These are tweaks that I use and have done on most computers I load.  Some of these tweaks are just because of my personal preferences and some are for speeding up Windows.  They involve editing registry keys and turning off system services and other settings.  Use at your own caution.
The links are to .reg files containing the registry settings.  You can save the file and view it in a text editor to see exactly what it’s going to do.

  • Remove Libraries in Windows Explorer
  • Remove home group from Windows Explorer
    • You need to leave a home group if you joined one before doing this.
    • Disable the home group listener and home group provider services.
  • Remove Shared Folder Synchronization – from an elevated command prompt:
    REG DELETE HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{6C467336-8281-4E60-8204-430CED96822D} /f
  • Right clicking My Computer tweaks – Registry File
    • Adds Device Manager
    • Adds Manage
    • Adds Services
  • Speed Tweaks:
    • Disable the Windows Search service
    • Turn off transparency
    • Set power options to High Performance
      Disable “Turn off hard drive after…”
    • SSD related
      • Disable Prefetch and SuperFetch (registry and Windows Service)
        Registry File
      • Disable drive indexing
      • Turn off Windows write-cache buffer
      • Turn on Trim
        To see it’s current state from a command prompt:
        fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
        0 = enabled, 1 = disabled
        Enable Trim: fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0
      • Disable disk defrag scheduled task and Windows service
    • TCP Optimizer
    • Turn off system restore
    • Turn off page file (if you have a decent amount of ram)
      Also disable ClearPageFileAtShutdown and LargeSystemCache
      Registry File
  • Some other userful tweaks from computingunleashed.com
    Registry File
    Does the following:

    • Programs that are hung will be terminated quickly
    • Menus will be shown faster.
    • Adds – Take Ownership when you right click on files or folders.
    • Disable searching for a program that no longer exists when you click on a broken shortcut.
    • Adds – Copy To and Move To options to the right click context.
    • Speeds up “Open With” right click menu option, gets rid of the search the internet choice.
    • Speeds up the navigation in Windows Explorer by disabling searching for network printers and scheduled tasks on network.
    • Disables the “low disk space” message notification in your system tray.
  • Black Viper Windows services guides