Claudio Lassala's Blog

These are two things available in Windows that I just came to find out recently. The first one made me feel REALLY stupid for not knowing it at first, but then I shared it with many other experienced Windows users, and to my relief, they didn’t know about it either.  🙂

Renaming files sequentially

So, we download pictures from the digital camera to the computer, and all the pictures are named something like DSFC4543.JPG, DSFC4544.JPG, and so on. Every once in a while I want to rename all the pictures within a folder as in Vacation2007-01.JPG, Vacation2007-02.JPG, etc.

Until not long ago, I actually had a little program I wrote that’d take a folder, and a root name (such as "Vacation2007", and then it’d rename all the files sequentially.

One or two months ago I learned that one can go to Windows Explorer, hit Ctrl+A to select all files, then F2 (default key for "Rename"), and then type in the root name for the files, and finally hit enter; Windows takes care of renaming all the files sequentially. Ouch! How come I had never thought of that??

Speed up those animations!

Windows has those fancy animations when one opens menus (like the Start menu and its sub-menus). It looks nice for the beginner users, but it really gets in the way for somebody trying to be productive; you know, you’re trying to get to something as fast as possible, and as you navigate to the menus, it seems to take forever to see the options showing up.

Well, there’s a setting on the Windows Registry that can be changed to speed up that animation time. The setting is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Control Panel, Desktop, and then select "MenuShowDelay" on the right panel. By default, that is set to 400; I’ve dropped mine to 1. Now the menus are flying out when I hover over the options!

Note: you must reboot the machine in order to see the results of changing this setting.