Nero 7 Premium

The word “Nero” is familiar to literally anyone who has ever burnt a CD. As time passed, alternatives to Nero were being released, with more features. But Nero shot right back and expanded from just another burning software to an entire suite containing a horde of nifty utilities ranging from audio/video converters to a full-fledged desktop search engine, which gives results within two seconds.

Nero Burning ROM
Everyone’s familiar with this one; it’s become part of our lives, This program is what we associate Nero with. Nero Burning ROM, once only a CD writing tool, has now expanded with more functionalities like copying CD/DVD images onto your hard drive to creating bootable CDs/DVDs. Working your way around this software should be simple enough with few problems, if any. Here, we provide you with tips towards stuff you probably weren’t aware existed.

Faster Start-up
If you’re using XP and have a slow computer, you will find that Nero, like other largish programs, takes a long time to start up.

The start-up type must be set to disabled for the changes to take effect, the manul option will not help

However, you can improve things by disabling the Windows inbuilt burner. You can do so by following these steps: type in “services.msc” at a command prompt and press [Enter]. Next look for “IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service” in the right-hand pane and double-click on it. In the start-up type dropdown box, select Disabled. Remember that you have to disable it-even the “Manual” option will not help. You should now notice the difference in the start-up speed of Nero.

Record With Multiple Recorders
Did you know that if you have two recorders, you can burn two discs at a time? Or create a CD image on your hard disk while your drive is busy writing CDs? Or better yet-keep both your drives busy writing while you create a CD image? Despite this sounding complicated, the trick is actually rather simple. Logic suggests that to burn one CD, you have to open up Nero once; so to burn two CDs, you open up Nero twice. That’s the trick! Open up Nero Burning ROM, leave the window open, than open Nero Burning ROM again. This will leave you with two open windows of Nero Burning ROM, and now you can burn two compilations at a time.

Quite a clutter of windows, but it used properly, you can keep all writers on your system busy

A word of caution-make dead sure that you choose the recorder accordingly for each window, otherwise you will end up with multiple compilations attempting to write to the same disc. And of course, your computer should be powerful enough to handle the multiple tasks.

Multiple Copies Of Your Disc
If you have two writers and want to make multiple copies of the same compilation, you can do so by going to File > Compilation Properties, clicking the Burn tab, and checking “Use multiple recorders”. Now when you set up your compilation and click Burn, you should see a list of recorders. Here you can select all the recorders you want. Selecting “Virtual CD” along with your recorder(s) in the list will make a copy of the CD image on your hard disk while your recorder is burning.

Customise Your View
Nero Burning ROM offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to customising views. You can stick your toolbars/menus literally anywhere within Nero. As a starter, you can drag the toolbar or the menu at the top by using the click and drag situated on the far right side of the toolbars and menus. To “nail” align them on a side, say, the left side, simply drag the toolbar or menu as far as you can on the left side and it will get attached there. What’s more, you can add additional toolbars with your own set of buttons. This feature is available in View > Customize; in the toolbars tab, click on New to create a new toolbar, then click on the Commands tab and drag the command of your choice from the right side into the toolbar. Then you can right-click on the command to rename it, give it an icon, remove the text and keep only the icon, etc.

To create a menu, click on New Menu at the top of the right-hand side, then drag the new menu control on the left hand side onto your toolbar. Again, right-clicking on the newly-created control gives you options to change it. Remember that you can get use the right-click context menu for “rename” etc. only if the Customize dialog box is open.
 
Last-used Volume Labels
You must have experienced those trying times when you set up your compilation neatly and accurately, but at the end, you find that the volume label is still the same from your last compilation. Actually, you can just turn off the remembering of volumes of your last burn session by going to File > Options, and unchecking the “Remember last used volume label” box.

Overburning, if used properly, can add a few minutes over the specified size on your disc

Commonly-used Keyboard Shortcuts
New compilation: [F1]
Open compilation: [Ctrl] [O]
Compilation properties: [F7]
Print compilation: [Ctrl] [P]
Save As: [F12]
Add files to compilation: [Ctrl] [D]
Cut: [Ctrl] [X]
Copy: [Ctrl] [C]
Paste: [Ctrl] [V]
Find: [Ctrl] [F]
Undo: [Ctrl] [Z]
Burn compilation: [Ctrl] [B]
Choose recorder: [Ctrl] [R]
Disc info: [Ctrl] [I]
Eject Disc: [Ctrl] [E]
Encode Tracks: [F8]
“What’s this” cursor: [Shift] [F1]

You can set your own keyboard shortcuts: click on View > Customize and then click on the Keyboard tab. Next click on the text box under “Press the new shortcut key”, enter the shortcut you want and click Assign.

No Nags
When working in the file browser, do you just want to remove that annoying confirmation dialog box? Or do you want a confirmation box for rename too, so you don’t accidently rename files? You can set these options by firing up regedit yet again, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAheadNero-Burning RomBrowser. See those values with the prefix “confirm”? They are the ones you need to edit. For example, if you want to enable the confirmation for renaming files, double click on ConfirmRename and give it a value of 1 (in decimal); 0 will disable it.

Nero Home
One welcome addition to Nero is Nero Home, a full-fledged Media Centre with the ability to scan certain areas of your HDD for any new media files. This search functionality depends on Nero Scout-another utility included with Nero. The general look and feel of this program is extremely user-friendly, and has Wizards to help you find your way around in the interface. The ability to include your own skins spice up this nifty media centre even further to a point where you can customise it to look any way you want. Enough of that, on to the tips.

Spice Up Nero Home With Your Own Background
Like how you change your wallpaper in Windows, you can change the background in Nero Home. Now, as you are probably aware, Nero Home already offers features such as themes and the ability to change your backgrounds; however, if you find them too drab for your liking, you can set your own background. First get an image of your choice ready in .JPG format. You don’t need to resize the picture in any way-Nero will resize your image by itself. However, for best viewing, make sure that the image fits your desktop resolution. Next copy this image and paste it into C:Program FilesNeroNero HomeSkins SpinGraphicsBackground. You can now select your chosen background in the settings of Nero Home.

Run Nero Home In Windowed Mode
Time for starting Nero Home in windowed mode, if that full screen makes you feel trapped inside a box!

To set Nero Home to start in windowed mode, open the Registry Editor, and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftware AheadNero HomeMediaBrowser.

Here, in the right-hand pane, double-click on the entry called “windowfullscreen” and set its value as 1 in any format, decimal or hexadecimal. The next time you open up Nero Home, it should open in windowed mode. Set the Registry value back to 1 to revert to your original settings.

Improve Performance
If you notice your computer becoming sluggish when using Nero Home, you can turn off media scanning. Media scanning scans particular folders for any additional media files (audio/video/etc.) and indexes them for faster searching within Nero Home. To turn off media scanning, open up Nero Home and double-click on the spanner icon, which takes you to the Settings. Next, click on General, and click on Media Scanning Options. Here you can disable scanning for certain file types, select only specific folders you want Nero Home to scan, or disable media scanning altogether.

Nero Showtime
Nero includes Nero Showtime, a full-fledged video player. You can use this to play any audio or video files, and it comes loaded with enough features to rival most video players out there.

Capture Your Videos
The capture feature within Nero Showtime offers a lot of options to capture frames for your video. You can find this option by right-clicking on Nero Showtime player and clicking on Preferences. Here, click on Capture Frame, and you will be faced with a multitude of options including capturing your images to clipboard where you can paste your images in your favourite image editing software, capturing the frame and setting the image as a wallpaper upon the touch of a button, or printing the captured image to your default printer.

If you choose to capture the image to a file, you can set the location where you want to save the image. The prefix for the resultant file, unfortunately, cannot be changed.

Customising Skins Manually
Again, you can customise specific areas of your skins however you want and whatever size you want. Go to C:Program FilesNeroNero 7Nero ShowtimeSkins. Here pick a skin, for example, red plastic. Copy all three files containing the “red plastic” prefix in their filename and rename the newly-created files to anything similar, for example, Nero.skn, Nero.bmp, and Nero_anime.bmp. Now double click on Nero.skn and you can change the buttons’ size and position. So if you have a problem aiming for that tiny control, or wish it could be replaced with something else, just change those numbers. A tip for changing positions: it’s wise if you choose to replace a button which is almost the same size as one of the others, after which you can switch their position numbers in the .skn file.

Clear Out History Of The Last Played File
In case you weren’t aware, Nero Showtime, when started, by default loads the last-played media file. And if you click on Play, the last media file will automatically play. Now if you have a file which you, umm, don’t want others to know exist on the system, you can clear out its trace from the history. This requires Registry tweaking. Enter the Registry Editor, and navigate your way through to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAheadNeroShowtimeSettings

Here look for the String value called “defmediafile”. Double-click on it and delete its contents to clear out the history of Nero Showtime. A word of caution-do not keep Nero Showtime open in the background when editing this entry, because after you close the Registry Editor, the entry will still remain in the history of Nero Showtime, as the program saves its settings upon being closed. Also do not forget HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-the same change needs to be made there too!

Profile Icons For Your Settings
If you keep changing settings as you view different movies, and don’t want to go through the settings every time, you can have icons containing different settings. Sounds neat? But it comes at a price-heavy Registry tweaking. Go back to the key

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAheadNero ShowtimeSettings
There’s a large number of settings including brightness etc., functions like radio buttons will have a value of 0, 1, 2, or 3 etc. For example, the “capture to” setting has three radio buttons; setting the value to 0 will set the first radio button, a value of 1 will choose the second option, and so on.

Once you’re done editing your settings, right-click on the Settings key in the left-hand pane and click Export. Give it any filename you want; a tip is to include the name of the video file which these settings are for-it’s similar to naming presets. Similarly, change the Registry values for your other settings and export them. Now, by just double-clicking the files you created, you can have different settings presets before opening movies.

Balloon ToolTips
Sick of the drab windows tooltips that come up in Nero Showtime? You can change the look to much more appealing balloon tips. In Options, click on the “tooltips” setting, and click on the “balloon tips” radio button. Now you can hover your cursor over buttons just to see how cool the new balloon tooltips can look compared to the ones Windows has to offer!

Commonly Used Keyboard Shortcuts
Play: [Enter]
Stop: [S]
Pause: [Spacebar]
Previous: [P]
Next: [N]
Step forward: [T]
Seek to time: [Ctrl] [G]
Options: [Ctrl] [C]
Full screen: [Z]
Change subtitles: [U]
Menu: [L]
Capture frame: [C]
Eject disc: [J]

Nero Scout
Nero Scout provides a full-fledged search engine similar to Google Desktop, offering instant searches; it also sits in the background and indexes your hard disk for new files. This is probably the most-used feature in Nero, along with Nero Burning ROM.

Save Your Searches
This feature can be handy when you searched for something long back and now want to remember what you had searched for. The search history normally shows the last 10 results of your search, but what about the last 100th result of your search? You can do exactly that: save your search string forever, you can do this by clicking on the arrow next to Nero Scout on the taskbar to bring up the advanced search, from here you can enter your search criteria and string after which you can click on the save button to save your searches. Now when you need to search for the same string again you can click on the saved searches tab in the same place-no need to remember filenames like whatasuperduperbigfilename.dll.

Choose The Right Places To Index
This feature can be extremely useful when used the right way. If you know where you need to search, you can choose to index files only of that particular folder. You can do so by clicking the arrow to the right of the Nero Scout search text box, click on Options, and then tweak your way through in the Indexing area. As you can see, you can set Nero Scout to exclude searching in your e-mails, other specific paths, or to index only certain files.

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Change The Window
In Outlook 2007, if you need more on-screen room, you can “collapse” the Navigation Pane. To do this, click the left arrows at the top of the Navigation Pane. It will get minimised to a vertical bar along the left edge of the Outlook window. Your favourite folders, as well as the icons for the Views-Calendar, Contacts, Mail, and Tasks-will still be available in the collapsed bar.

Change the window

To reset the navigation pane to what it was, click the right arrows at the top of the bar.

Adding Tasks To The Calendar
In earlier versions of Outlook, tasks and the Calendar were separate. To keep track of one event, you needed to create entries in both views. In this iteration of Outlook, you can schedule time for tasks simply by dragging them to the Calendar. And using the Daily Task List, you can modify tasks’ dates simply by dragging them from one day to another. Note that as you do this, the To-Do Bar gets updated accordingly.

Change The Look Of The To-Do Bar
You can! Just click anywhere in the Bar’s title, and choose Customize. You can now control how many months and appointments are displayed. You can also choose to hide them entirely.

Colourising Tasks
In Outlook 2007, you can assign a colour category to any item you’ve created-for example, an appointment in the Calendar. Use the Categorize control for this: with the Appointment window open, click Categorize, and from the list that appears, choose the colour you want. The Categories column will appear below the Appointment area.

Colouring Tasks

Now, say you categorise all business appointments Red. If this category is often used, you can set up the Quick Click feature. This feature enables you to make this category the default (to get activated whenever you click an item). To achieve this, right-click the item and choose Categorize, then select “Set Quick Click”. Choose the colour you want to use as the Quick Click category, then click OK.

Comparing Calendars
It’s easy in Outlook 2007 to compare two or more Calendars so you can choose, say, when the people involved can have a meeting. The Calendars available for you to view-say those that have been e-mailed to you-are displayed in the Calendars navigation pane. By default, these appear side by side.
You can layer Calendars on top of each other using Overlay Mode, so as to be able to find free time slots easily. Select the Calendars, then click the green arrow on the Calendar at the right.
So which appointment is in which Calendar? You can tell by colouring them. The appointments from the underlying Calendar will be, as you’ll find, in the same colour as that Calendar’s title bar.

Getting Some Action Into Your Mails
Some mails in your Inbox are always more important than others, and they might need to be worked on immediately. In Outlook 2007, you can use the enhanced flagging feature to distinguish an important mail from the others. The idea is that when you add a flag, the item is automatically added to the To-Do bar!

Use Enhanced Flagging to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak

Enhanced Flagging #2
The enhanced flagging we mentioned in the previous tip extends to messages that are sent and received. For example, a draft (say, of a company-wide proposal) can be sent as an e-mail to everyone working on the same draft, and say you need a response from everyone by a particular date. What you need to do is just flag the mail for follow-up. When this mail arrives at the others’ mailboxes, the message is added to their To-Do Bars-as a task with a response date.

Fix the Quick Access Toolbar!
When you need to insert something into your mail-say a picture-you need to go to the Insert tab. And then you find you can’t send the item right away-you need to click on the Message tab to see the Send button again. The Send button should have been made available on the Quick Access Toolbar!
It’s easy to fix this. Right-click on the Quick Access Toolbar, and choose “Customize…” From the list of commands, choose Send and then Add. Click OK. You’ll now have the Send button where you want it.

A Helping Hand?
You might just face this situation where, when you try to select some text in mail, rather than the “select” cursor, you have the “hand” cursor that lets you “grab” the message and move it about. The toolbar does offer “Select Text” as a command, but it Selects All.

If this is happening, you just need to know that the Reading Pane has the “hand” cursor that lets you pan around the message. So just click on the hand icon above the scrollbar-along the right edge-to turn it off. You can click on it again to bring the “hand” cursor back.

Searching The Trash
Outlook 2007 doesn’t search in the Deleted Items, which you certainly might want to change.
Go to Tools > Instant Search >
Search Options. This will bring up the Search Options dialog box. In the Deleted Items section of the dialog box, tick the “Include messages…” checkbox. Click OK.

Multiple Outlook Windows!
Many people do a lot of switching between Outlook folders, in particular between Mail and Calendar and Tasks-by clicking the appropriate one in the Navigation Pane. There is, however, an easier and faster way: open multiple Outlook windows!

With a Mail window, a Calendar window, and a Task window all open, you can jump back and forth using [Alt] [Tab]. Plus, you can set each window up the way you want it.

To open multiple Outlook windows at the same time: in the Navigation Pane, right-click the folder you want to open in its own window. A shortcut menu will appear. Click “Open in New Window”. The new window will appear. Adjust the new window to suit your preferences. Then repeat for any other windows you want to open.

Place the Reading pane anywhere you want to, or remove it completely

Reposition Or Remove The Reading Pane
You can position the Reading pane to the right or the bottom of the Outlook window, and you can also turn it off. You can do this individually for each folder-so you can have the Reading Pane at the right in Mail, at the bottom for Contacts, and Off for the other views. It’s simple. Open the Outlook folder in question. In the main menu, select View > Reading Pane. A Reading Pane menu appears. Select Right, Bottom, or Off. The Reading pane changes to match your selection. If the Reading pane is visible, resize it to suit your preference by dragging its edge.

Transform Types
You’ll sometimes feel the need to create a task based on a message you receive, or turn a task into an appointment, and so on. Usually, you’d do this by manually creating a new item, copying stuff from the old into the new, then deleting the old item. A simpler way is to use Outlook’s drag-and-drop capabilities.
Right-click and drag the item you want to transform. If the correct window is visible, drop the item on it. If it isn’t, drop the item on the correct button in the Navigation pane. A menu will appear. In this menu, select the option you want. You can copy the item to the new location, or you can move it there. Once you select an option, a dialog box appears containing the information from the original item. Just fill in any additional information and save the item!

Mail Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts from Outlook 2003 and earlier work in the 2007 version, but there are new ones you can use when working with the Ribbon. Ribbon shortcuts differ from the old ones-they all start off when you press and release the [Alt] key. Each shortcut here means that you press and release [Alt], then enter the following keys, in the order specified.

[H] > [A] > [C]    Centre the selected paragraph
[H] > [A] > [L]    Align the selected paragraph with the left margin
[H] > [A] > [U]    Turn the paragraph into a bulleted list
[H] > [A] > [N]    Turn the paragraph into a numbered list
[H] > [F] > [F]    Select the Font list. Use [Down Arrow] to open the list, and [Enter] to switch to the selected font
[H] > [A] > [I]    Increase the indentation of the selected paragraph
[H] > [A] > [U]    Decrease the indentation of the selected paragraph
[H] > [Y] > [S]    Start the spell-checker
[O] > [Q]    Open the Zoom dialog box
[N] > [P]    Open the Insert Picture dialog box

Set A Reminder For A Message
When you need to do this for a closed message, in the Unread Mail pane or the Inbox, right-click the message. A shortcut menu will appear. Click “Follow Up”. In the “Follow Up” menu that appears, click “Add Reminder”. The Custom dialog box will appear. Set the Reminder checkbox. This activates the Reminder date and time boxes beneath the checkbox. Next, select a date and time for the reminder to appear. Choose what the reminder will sound like by clicking the sound button to the right of the date and time boxes. Click OK. You’re done.