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Direct from HowToGeek comes instructions on adding a simple registry tweak that will allow you to add “Defragment” to the context menu on any drive when you right click it.

After manually applying or downloading the hack, you’ll have a new item on the right-click menu for your drives…

Which will start up the command-line version of Disk Defragmenter (after accepting the UAC prompt)

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell

Create a new key under shell called “runas”, and then set the (Default) value to “Defragment”. If you want to hide this menu item behind the Shift key right-click menu, then add a new string called Extended with no value.

Next, you’ll need to create a key called “command” and set the default value to the following, which is the command to run defrag with the default options but show verbose output.

defrag %1 -v

You can alternately choose from one of the other defrag switches here if you’d like.

Downloadable Registry Hack

HowToGeek provides a downloadable registry hack to do all of this for you. Simply download, extract, and double-click on either AddDefragToDriveMenu.reg (for the regular menu) or AddDefragToExtendedDriveMenu.reg (to hide behind the Shift key). There’s also an included removal script that will remove either one.

If you find the popup notification balloons in the Windows Vista system tray to be annoying, you might be interested to know that you can completely disable them. Typically you can just turn them off in the applications causing the notifications (probably you’re best bet), but if you want to disable them across the board, this is the solution.

Note: I’m not necessarily recommending that everybody do this… you should only bother with it if you need to solve this particular problem.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click on the right-hand pane, and create a new 32-bit DWORD with the following values:

• Name: EnableBalloonTips
• Value: 0

You’ll have to logoff and back on in order to see the change.