Let's begin the year with some Helpful Hints for Win-8.1

I'm a late-comer to Windows 8.1, so you may already be aware of these, but let me do my thing about them anyway, please...

First, if you liked those gold-colored cursors from Windows XP, and you'd like to be able to continue using them, the good news is, "Yes, you may!". Just get a copy of the official set, and put it into a new folder, and then copy that folder into your C:\Windows\Cursors folder, and you will then be able to choose those along with the default sets, and you can "mix and match" if you like. I'm using the default set for Win-8.1 except for the first (arrowhead) cursor, which is now the gold one, from Windows XP. It looks classier, I think, and it shows better on a black desktop.

Next, I've discovered those nasty big black boxes with really big red arrows that suddenly appear along the edges of your screen, offering mindlessly obnoxious advice about returning to something you didn't want to stay with the first time. They blot out your desktop icons, or whatever, and.....well here's what one guy said about it....

There's a YouTube video explaining how to hack the Registry to stop these, but the nice young lad who made it left out one vital step - there's no key in Win-8.1 for the "EdgeUI" to which he refers. So I'm not going to confuse you with his video. Instead, let me just tell you what you need to do to edit your Registry so as to prevent these damned annoying "helpful hints" from popping up and blotting out the sun....

Hold down your Windows key, while pressing "R" on your keyboard and when the Run box appears, type in "Regedit.exe" (without quotes) and click "OK".
Navigate to the following in the left-hand column of Registry Editor:
H-Key Current User\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows.
Right-click on the word "Windows" in that left-hand column, and choose "New" and "Key" and in the space for its name, type in "EdgeUI" (no quotes!) and this will create the missing key below the main Windows word. Now right-click on that new key word EdgeUI, and choose "New" and "Dword" which will appear in the right-hand column. Name your new Dword "DisableHelpSticker" (no quotes).
Now that you have this new Dword created, right-click it to bring up another dropdown, from which choose the top item "Modify" and give it a setting of "01" for its hexadecimal value, which means "Disable". (If you ever lose your mind and want to enable it again, change that to "0" which means "Enable".)

Now, don't close Registry Editor yet, because we have to do all this one more time, at H-Key Local Machine\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows. And just as above, you need to begin by creating that Key for EdgeUI, just as we did above, and then continue the rest of the procedure to create its new Dword, exactly as above, and set it also to a value of "01" meaning "disable". Now, you can close Registry Editor, and say "goodbye" to those annoying big red arrows.

These show the changes you need to make in Registry Editor as described above.

A Microsoft MVP advises that we can forever get rid of those pop-ups by simply doing what it asks, but that doesn't always work. He doesn't explain it very well and for those of us without a touch-enabled screen, it's difficult to get it to go away by "swiping in from the edge of the screen" (It seems to assume we all have Touch screens). To do as it asks with your mouse pointer, poke it up into the left top corner or the right top corner (depending which side the pop-up is) and then move it down along the edge slightly. The popup should go away. And as for that "swipe in from the edge", don't do any swiping directly on top of the pop-up. That doesn't register. Do it just above or just below it. And if all else fails, and you are comfortable with hacking the Registry, use my method above.

This is a little something about those DWORDS and how we can use them.

There's also another situation in Registry where "01" simply means "one" as when we're counting things, such as when we want to reset the counter for the number of Screenshots that have been taken. Let me give you an example:-

Navigate in Registry Editor to H-Key Current User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer in the left-hand pane, and then look in the right-hand pane (the 'Value' pane) for a Dword named "ScreenshotIndex" (no quotes) and you can reset its counter back to "one" by right-clicking that Dword, choosing "Modify" from the little dropdown, and then giving it a new value of "01" again, without the quotes. But if you don't see it there, you can create it......

Just right-click an empty spot in that right-hand pane ( as shown below the list of values at the top) and choose "New" and "DWORD (32-bit) Value" and then do as above to give it the new value "01". 

I'd better mention here that even though I have a 64-bit Processor in this rig, I'm using the 32-bit version of Windows. So if you're using the 64-bit version of Windows, then you may need to be using "QWORD (64-bit) Value" instead of my DWORD examples. (I'm using 32-bit Windows, because it needs less RAM and my rig doesn't have room for a lot more of it.) And I hope this takes some of the mystery out of the Registry for you. Tinkering with it can result in mistakes that can prevent your computer from booting up and running, we're cautioned, but if you're careful, and avoid those mistakes, you can "fine-tune" the system for better behavior.