SndVolPlus 1.0 released
SndVolPlus is a tiny standalone app, that's a replacement for the standard Windows volume control icon.
SndVolPlus Volume Control
It functions exactly the same as the original "SndVol.exe", with two huge extras:
- Middle clicking the volume icon toggles mute
- Double clicking it opens the Volume Mixer directly
Windows 7 Volume Mixer
I wrote it out of frustration when I couldn't easily mute Windows Media Center when watching live television. Now that I can, I've put it up so you can to! This, like most of my recent projects, is BSD licensed open source, with it's own repository on BitBucket (link).
Feature Focus: How to disable the “Windows cannot open this file” dialog box
If you've ever clicked on some file in Windows and seen this dialog box, you know what I'm talking about:
The web service is completely useless, and most of the time you already know what program you want to use to open the file. Luckily, it is easy to disable this dialog box with Default Programs Editor (download). Simply launch the program, and click on the Options button:
Options button
Then, click the button that says
Disable 'Search web for unknown extension' Dialog Box
Disable 'Search web for unknown extension' Dialog Box
And that's it!
Now, when you try to open a file with an unknown extension, Windows will skip the unknown extension dialog and display the "Open With..." window to choose a program.
Default Programs Editor
This is an advanced Windows file association utility
Here is some sweet stuff you can do with it:
- Manually add extension information
- Change a file type's description
- Change a file type's icon
- Change an extension's associated file type
- Add/Edit/Delete an extension's default association
- Add/Edit/Delete other entries on the file's context menu
- Preserve verb precedence hierarchy
- View shell extension entries on the context menu
- Remove 'Default Programs' association that Windows likes to make annoying to change
- Add/Edit/Delete your own autoplay handlers
- Change which autoplay options are available for users
- Disable that "Search web for unknown extension" dialog
- Single .exe utility, no installation
On top of all that, here are some bonus features:
- Make changes direct to the registry, or export them as .reg files for easy distribution
- Designed for Vista, with UAC support, so you can painlessly run as a standard user
- Works with XP too (a few features disabled, just use TweakUI)
- Make changes to your user account, or the machine default, or both
Documentation is admittedly sparse right now, but here are some how-to's:
Feel free to email me with any suggestions or questions.