I spent the night tweaking my computer running windows 7. I got a little performance gains but unfortunately, the Win-key keyboard shortcuts no longer work.
How do you fix them? What service requires them?
I'm mainly interested in the ones that move and re-size working window to half the screen.
Check this:
Go to Windows' "Ease of access center" by typing that exactly on START menu's search box.(or, just press WIN+U)
Find and click "Make the keyboard easier...".
Uncheck the box with "Prevent...." under "Make it easier to manage windows" if it is checked.
For me the culprit was ConEmu's icon in the system tray. Closing it or simply clicking on it made the keyboard shortcut work again.
PS: this never happened before I updated to ConEmu 160619 [64]
That feature is called "Aero Snap" and here is a webpage about how to enable and disable it :) http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/enable-and-disable-aero-snap-docking-windows-7/
FYI - The full path to enable the windows+[arrow] function is: Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Ease of Access Center\Make it easier to focus on task -- (keyboard works too as mentioned originally - they both take you to the same place).
Then you have to scroll down to heading that says "Make it easier to manage windows". This threw me off at first because the window doesn't look like there's any more content. So scroll down against your better instincts, then the full name of the "prevent" feature listed above is "Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen" -- make sure it's unchecked... I had to uncheck, recheck, uncheck to get my shortcut to start working again.
After following all of the advice listed (turning on and off all functions in the Windows "ease of access centre" I still didn't get it to work... until:
Reboot AGAIN after you toggle everything ON, APPLY, toggle OFF, APPLY
Then reboot.
Crazy, but it worked!
When I disabled the aero snap feature, which I did not like, the hotkeys for multi-monitor windows management quit working.
When I followed up to enable these (windows shift and arrow) hotkeys, I found "prevent windows ... edge of the screen" box was checked.
Unchecking "prevent windows ... edge of the screen" did re-enable the windows management hotkeys and unfortunately the snap feature which I did not like was also re-enabled.
So this setting apparently does more than disable the annoying snap-to feature, it also disables the useful keyboard shortcuts.
I had this issue but it was not because anything was disabled. Instead, I think windows explorer was in some kind of weird state where it was not recognizing the shortcuts.
Ultimately, I had to kill explorer.exe from the task manager (ctrl + shift + escape and find Windows Explorer or explorer.exe, and right-click -> end task). After you do this, it should restart to where you have your taskbar and everything back. If it does not, just re-open task manager, file -> run new task -> type "explorer.exe" -> click OK.
