1. Lock Your Computer

When you need to go out and you don’t want anyone snooping around your computer, you can either lock it or shut it down. Of course, you also need a password on your account to make this completely effective. This way, anyone trying to intrude on your computer will be blocked by a password dialog and won’t be able to access your information. It’s very useful for office computers. Locking your computer normally involves going through the Start menu, sifting through the shutdown menu, and clicking “Lock.” Instead of doing all this, create a shortcut with the following location: That’s all you need to do! Give it a try!

2. Enable/Disable Windows Firewall

Perhaps locking your computer from the Start menu isn’t a big deal, but there’s a long process to go through if you want to work with your firewall. You’ll have to reach a dialog in the control panel.

Instead, you can create two shortcuts in your desktop. The following “location” will disable the firewall: To create a shortcut that enables the firewall, just change “disable” in the command to “enable.” When you’re done creating both shortcuts, you have to make them run as Administrator by right-clicking an icon, clicking “Properties,” and navigating to the “Shortcut” tab. After clicking the “Advanced” button, you can enable the option to “Run as administrator.”

3. Safely Remove Hardware

When unplugging a vital device connected to your computer via USB, you have to go through the system tray on the taskbar. If you want to skip that and just click a shortcut, create a shortcut with the following location: And that’s it!

4. Clearing Your Clipboard

When you copy something through the right-click menu or “Ctrl+C,” you fill something on your computer called the “clipboard” with data. This piece of your computer’s memory will hold that data until you turn off the computer unless you clear it beforehand. Insert the following in the “location” field when creating a shortcut to clear your clipboard: This completely erases any data found within the clipboard whenever you click the shortcut!

5. Turn Aero’s Glassy Transparency On And Off

Manually, you would have to modify the glassy stuff in Aero through the “Personalization” menu, found by right-clicking your desktop. If you want to skip all that, you can create two shortcuts. To enable Aero glass, create a shortcut with the following location: And to disable the glassy transparency, create another shortcut with this: And you’re done!

Like What You Saw?

As we discover new shortcuts, we’ll post them up here in another article. Hopefully, you got something useful out of this! Please comment if you have a question.