Hello lovely people 🙂
Has there ever been a time when you have copied something to the clipboard and you don’t really want to just leave it there in case someone else is going to be using your computer. While it is very easy to copy something else to the clipboard to cover what you’ve placed there, wouldn’t it be faster and far simpler to just make a shortcut or hotkey to clear it? And this is precisely what this installment of out computer repairs how to(s) is all about.
Using the built in clip.exe utility in Vista or Windows 7 you can. While it is not actually meant to clear the clipboard with a command line in a shortcut we can make it do what we want.
Please note – this is also very handy if you have copied a lot of data to your clipboard and you don’t want it wasting any more memory
How to create a Shortcut Icon to Clear the Clipboard
First just right-click on the desktop or elsewhere, and choose New Shortcut from the menu.
Enter the following command into the shortcut location box
cmd /c “echo off | clip”
You now have a small icon that will immediately clear the clipboard, but we can take this one step further.
Choose *Properties* by right clicking on the icon – then change the Run drop-down to *Minimised* just to make sure you don’t see the command prompt. If you want to, you can also assign a shortcut key here.
If you click the Change Icon button and then browse down to this file, you can find a clipboard icon:
%SystemRoot%system32shell32.dll
Now we’ve got a nice-looking icon that will clear out the clipboard sitting on our desktop.
Please note – If you are using Windows XP, you can download clip.exe from Microsoft. Just save the file in the Windows directory and the rest of the hack should work for you.
Happy calibrating, fellow computer repairs people.
Over and out
MobileGeekette
