Sticky Notes

• To open a new Sticky Note, type sticky in start search and hit Enter.

• To change its size, drag it from its bottom right corner.

• To change its color, right click the note and then click the color you want.

• To create a new sticky note, click on the ‘+‘ sign in its top left corner.

• To close a sticky note, right click on its taskbar icon and select ‘Close window’. If you reopen Stiky Notes now, you will see the earlier Notes. The Notes will appear exactly where you left them, even if you restart your Windows computer.

• To delete a sticky note click on the ‘x‘ mark in its top right corner.

Once its running and you start making notes, you can use the following keyboard shortcut keys to format its text:

Select the text where required, and then press the desired keys:

1. Bold: Ctrl+B
2. Italics: Ctrl+I
3. Underline: Ctrl+U
4. Strikethrough: Ctrl+T
5. Bullet list: Ctrl+Shift+L
6. Increase size of text: Ctrl+Shift+>
7. Decrease size of text: Ctrl+Shift+<
8. See the options when you press Ctrl+Shift+L each time (1 to 5 times).. To get Roman numerals: Press 5 times, Ctrl+Shift+L.
9. Capitalize (or otherwise) highlighted letters: Ctrl+Shift+A
10. Right Align : Ctrl+R
11. Center align: Ctrl+E
12. Left Align: Ctrl+L
13. Single line space: Ctrl+1
14. Double line space: Ctrl+2
15. 1.5 line space: Ctrl+5

Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc of course work as usual. Know any more? Do share below in the comments!

Backup, Save, Restore Sticky Notes

You can backup the Windows 7 Sticky Notes by backing up this file to another location:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes\StickyNotes.snt

You may have to show hidden/system files via the Folder Options.

To restore it, delete the sticky notes from your desktop and copy paste the backed up one into this folder:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes folder

How To Retrieve Back The Lost Notes, After Closing Windows Vista’s Sidebar Notes Gadget may interest some Windows Vista users.

Turn the Sticky Note delete warning back on

If you have at any point, on selecting delete,  opted to NOT have the confirmation box show up again, by selecting Don’t Display this message again, and would now like to get this delete confirmation box, here is the way to do it.

Open Registry Editor and navigate to the following key :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\StickyNotes

Now delete the value called PROMPT_ON_DELETE or set its value to 1.

If you do not want to touch the Windows registry, you could simply download our freeware FixWin to fix the issue, quickly.

Change Sticky Notes font

Windows uses the Segoe Print font. Changing of the default is not supported in Sticky Notes. What you can do is type your text in the desired font in a text editor like Word, and copy-paste it here. The Sticky Note should display the text in that font. Let us know if this works for you.

How to minimize Windows Sticky Notes to your notification area and Sticky Notes alternatives may also interest you.

Launch Multiple Programs From A Single Shortcut Using A Batch File

Some PC applications just work together like two peas in a pod. I’m talking about pairs like Winamp and Last.fm. There’s Skype and Pidgin, Steam and Raptr, and more. When you’re using one of these, launching the next one just feels natural. However, having too many paired program groups like this can really cause some serious clutter on the desktop.

That being said, is there really a need to have both shortcuts on your desktopwhen two applications work alongside each other? If you don’t think so and you’re running Windows, let me show you how to combine both applications into a single shortcut icon for your desktop.

Pick Your Icon

The first step to setting this up, after you’ve picked out the two (or more) applications that you want to combine into a single shortcut, is selecting your main shortcut icon. This is an optional step of the process, but bypassing it means that you’ll be using the Windows icon for every batch file as your shortcut icon.

If the desktop icon you want to use is already on the desktop, then good. Keep it there. If not, find the application whose icon you want to use (either through your Start menu or through Windows Explorer), right-click on it, and select Desktop (create shortcut) from the Send to menu.

Get Program Paths

The next step is to collect the program paths of the applications that you are trying to launch. Again, to do this you can use the Start menu or Windows Explorer. Simply find the application, right-click on it, and select Properties. The Target field is what we’re looking for.

Copy what’s in that field and paste it into an empty Notepad window so that you have it somewhere easily accessible. Do this same thing with the second program that you’re trying to launch.

Create the Batch File

To make this work, we now need to take those two application paths and work them into a batch file. We have explained how to write simple batch file previously. Open the Notepad file that contains the program paths you copied earlier and adjust it to look like the example below.

@echo off
cd "C:\Program Files\CCleaner"
start CCleaner64.exe

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Wunderlist2"
start Wunderlist.exe

exit

Above is an example of the complete batch file script. Below is a breakdown of what is going on in the script.

@echo off
This simply prevents commands from being displayed in the command prompt, which is used to execute your batch file.

cd "C:\Program Files\CCleaner"
This is changing our directory to the CCleaner directory (which we got from the program path earlier).

start CCleaner64.exe
This is launching the executable file (that we noted in Notepad earlier) from within the directory we just navigated to.

exit
That one’s kind of self-explanatory.

In Notepad, save this file (making sure your Save as type is set to All Files) with the .bat extension. Take note of the path where you’ve saved this file at, in Notepad, because we’ll need it in the next step.

Point Your Shortcut to the Batch File

Remember that icon we placed on the desktop earlier? Right-click it, select Properties, and look at the Target field. This should display the path to your application.

Now, change that to the path of your batch file. Click Apply and OK.

Launch Your Batch File From The Shortcut

Now, double-click the shortcut icon on your desktop. You should see a command prompt window quickly open, then close (as the first line of the batch file forces), then your two applications should launch!

Conclusion

As someone who really appreciates automation, it’s worth it to take these five minutes of your time to save yourself the unnecessary clicks and effort it would otherwise take you to launch two applications at once. It keeps your desktop nice and tidy, too.

Got any neat ideas for other ways that this batch file trick could work? Any suggestions for program pairs that you’d throw in a batch file like this? Leave me a comment below and let’s talk about it!

Are batch files really not your thing? Check out my favorite application launcher for Windows: Fingertips! Feeling cluttered on your desktop but really not interesting in combining shortcut icons? Here’s how to clean up your desktop efficiently!

Interrupted Download? Here’s How To Resume In Chrome

Have you ever been in the process of downloading a large file in Chrome, then suddenly and without warning, your Internet gets disconnected or your computer hangs and you are forced to reboot? A download could also be interrupted by accidentally removing the electrical power cord from the wall socket or through power outage in your area.

When you finally get your computer up and running again, you agonizingly realize your download progress has disappeared and you have to restart.

If this happens a couple of times, a simple download can take ages to complete. If you are on a limited bandwidth plan or your carrier throttles your data after you exceed the fair usage limit, the consequences of an interrupted download can be expensive.

Unfortunately, unlike Firefox and Internet Explorer which allow you to easily resume interrupted downloads, this is one area that Chrome fails miserably. If you are a die-hard Chrome user, then the following workaround should help you avoid restarting a big download. Take note that I tested this in Windows 7.

WGet

This handy application is free and is part of the GNU project. Its primary purpose is to retrieve content from web servers. The name is a combination of the words “World Wide Web” and “Get”. Download the program and install it on your computer. Do not install it in the default programs folder. Select a different install location, because you will need to copy the failed download file to the same location as Wget’s executable file.

Locate the unconfirmed download file, paste it into the same location as the Wget executable file. Look in the Google Drive > GnuWin32 > Bin folder.

Rename it by deleting the “.crdownload” extension as shown below. Click Yes in the notification that pops up.

Next, in the download location folder, press and hold down the Shift key, right click and select Open Command Window Here.

A command window should launch. Type in the following command wget -c [URL], where [URL] is the download link, and press Enter. You can find the download link by going to your Chrome downloads page using the shortcut Ctrl +J.

You will notice that the download picks up where it left off before the interruption. Once the download completes, the command window closes. Confirm that file has been downloaded by checking the download location.

Can You Do It With An Extension or App?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a Chrome download manager that resumes interrupted downloads in same way a Firefox add-on such as DownThemAll is able do it. I tested out several popular Chrome download managers and they all failed to pick up a download at the point it was interrupted. The only option available was to restart the download. Chrome simply doesn’t have this functionality yet but we hope the developers will include this feature in the next release. This is yet another thing Chrome doesn’t let you do, that Firefox does.

Experimental Features

There is a Chrome experimental feature that is supposed to enable download resumption though I couldn’t get it to work in Windows 7. The feature can be accessed by typing “Chrome://flags” in your URL bar. This takes you to Chrome’s experimental features. Scroll down and look for Enable Download Resumption andclick Enable.

If this works, you should see a new context menu item labelled Resumeuponright clicking on the file in Chrome’s download page . But, like I said, this is an experimental feature and the developers make no guarantees on whether it works. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t work in Windows 7 and I am only including this information here for the benefit of Mac, Linux and Chrome OS users who may have better luck with the feature.

How Do You Resume Your Downloads?

Finally, if you need to download a really big file, for the moment it is best to use Firefox if your Internet connection is choppy. Alternatively, you could search online for the torrent version of the file and download it using a Bit Torrent client such uTorrent. This certainly adds a twist to the Chrome Vs Firefox Vs Opera debate.

Have you ever had to resume an interrupted download in Chrome?