Shrink the XP Volume Control

Thursday, March 1, 2012

If you’ve just done something in front of a non-geek that surprises them enough to ask “How’d you do that?”, you’ve probably performed a Stupid Geek Trick. Usually these tricks aren’t anything complicated, just little known fun tricks that we like to share.

For today’s Stupid Geek Trick, we’re going to show you how to shrink the XP volume control with a keystroke. And just so I can use my favorite wallpaper, we’re talking about the volume control when you double-click on the Volume icon in the tray.

Once the dialog is up, hit the Ctrl+S key combination…

And your volume control should shrink down to a mini version! Using the same key combination again will change it back to the big version.

Note that you can also remove some of the sliders that you might not use by going to Options \ Properties, and then unchecking everything you don’t need.

In case you are wondering, this doesn’t work in Vista. Got any more fun geek tricks? Share them in the comments.

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How to Shut Down or Reboot Your Windows 8 PC

How to Shut Down or Reboot Your Windows 8 PC

Yeah, you’re right, the title of this article should make you laugh, and with good reason: it should be easy to shut down your PC, right? Well, Windows 8 makes it a little more confusing. Here’s how to do it if you haven’t figured it out already.
Note: the idea of Windows 8 is that it’s a lot more like an iPad or similar gadget—you don’t need to shut it down entirely, because it will go into a low power mode when you shut the laptop lid, or hit the power button on a tablet. That’s why the shutdown feature is hidden away.

Shutting Down or Rebooting Your Windows 8 PC

There’s more than one way to get to the shutdown function—the first method, which is mostly useful for a tablet user, is to move your mouse to the upper right-hand corner to trigger the Charms menu (or you can use Win + C ) and then find the Settings button on there. If you’re on a tablet, you can access the right-hand menu by swiping the top right corner of the screen.

The second method is to simply use Win + I (that’s a capital letter i ) and the Settings panel will slide right out with the Power button on it.

The last method is to just create your own shutdown or reboot shortcuts and pin them to the regular Windows 7 desktop. You can also create shortcuts and pin them to the Metro desktop as well. If you really wanted to get slick, you could make your own shortcut keys to directly start the shut down process.

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