Your Windows Tip of the Day.....Sysinternals Suite

This suite of 'more than 60' troubleshooting programs contains, among others,
the Autoruns program which shows you all those often-hard-to-find locations where various programs (and malwares) like to start up from, and you can disable any by simply removing its check mark from the little box at the beginning of its line in the list. With it, for example, you can find and disable one of those 'bloatware' nasties called 'TopArcadeHits' and its Adware cover alias of GameVance. This hides in your AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs folder, but you likely won't look in there unless you get and use Sysinternals Autoruns.

Another handy-dandy helper is Procmon or Process Monitor, which can connect the dots for you if you're wondering about all the connections and handles that a process might have, and some have a breathtaking assortment. You may not use this all that often, but when you need it, it's really helpful.

And 'helpful' is the name of the game with another in the collection, Zoomit, which as the name implies, zooms things in or out on your desktop. Park your mouse over something, hit CTRL + 1, and whatever was under the mouse will
be magnified by however many times you chose in the config window for it. This
isn't quite like the lens on your superzoom camera, but the principle's the same.
You can find Sysinternals Suite here.

This is an example of Zoomit, looking at my desktop icons, or rather two and a half of them. And yes, you can make your own icons, and yes I made that one for Sysinternals. You can make them with this program, called IcoFX. It works really well, and I was lucky - I got mine when it was still a 'freebie'..... and that
freebie still works in the latest Windows 8. If you'd like to make your own icons from images you find on the web, this is the program for it. All three of those icons above are my own creations, using IcoFX.