Windows Tips 'n' Tricks

Windows Tips 'n' Tricks

Nikhil Rastogi, Mar 30, 2008 1033 hrs IST

Little things that make a difference like the context menu, and more

Beat malicious programs

By spotting them before they spot on you. OK, don't you sometimes wish there were an easier way to spot certain types of files before you opened them? And I'm not referring to only .EXEs. Sure, you could unhide known extensions, but that would cause all extensions to show up. How bout an option that lets you select what filetype extensions you want to see?

Being able to do so would have a two-fold advantage: one, for security reasons, you can make programs -- especially that come through popular e-mail clients such as Outlook -- obvious. For example, picture.jpg.exe, a malicious program masquerading as an image file. Second, you can easily discern the filetypes you need to -- this is more of a convenience factor than anything else; a geek thing, I know!

The Two Ways
The first, and easiest way to do this, is through Windows' own flip switch to display all filetype associations. The disadvantage of this is that whenever you try to rename a file, you have to be careful not to change the extension by mistake. Not a problem with Vista, though. Also, depending on your choice of aesthetics, viewing file extensions all the time can make your files look a bit ugly, which is why many people prefer to hide them.

There's a second and geekier way, through a Registry hack. Unfortunately, I know of no program that does this for you easily. If you guys do, do give us a holler. Be careful though -- tinkering with the Windows Registry is something you must be careful while doing.