18 Tips, Tweaks & features On Windows Vista at a glance
Windows Vista has got many useful features in it. Depending on your way of working, you can modify Vista system to make easier and quicker to operate. It is a flexible operating system. Here are my top 18 tips & tweaks.
Change Vista Look & Feel
1. You can change the look of Vista desktop screen, if they feel bored at the pretty vista aero theme. They can select themes like Windows Classic etc. for a change. Ofcourse You make Vista look like XP. But believe me, you can make vista look like Leopard or Ubuntu. I think, that will be really cool. Try it.
Vista installer now includes drivers for standard hardware
2. Windows Vista installer now includes drivers for all most all standard hardware devices. This means when purchasing a new hardware, make sure that, the component is Vista compatible or not. If not, the device may not work in Windows Vista at all. Some devices need separate driver software, which will be provided with the hardware at the time of purchasing by the manufacturers.
Built in support for SATA Drives
3. Windows Vista Installer now can detect and install the SATA drives. One need not bother about drivers for SATA drives.
Intelligent Windows Vista Installer
4. Windows Vista Setup gets interrupted sometimes due to shutdown and reboots. If so, try to start the computer without booting from Vista DVD. Vista installer is intelligent enough to start from where it was left off earlier. If does not, then you will have to start from the scratch, i.e., from the beginning.
Vista search engine
5. Windows Vista saves search results in a special virtual folder. There is a virtual folder called \\Searches. One need not go to search options, and type what he/she wants to search. Instead, they can specify the folder name \\Search followed by the user created search folder. Newly searched items get updated within the folder itself and search results are displayed to the user.
Let us think in the above direction for the reasons
Vista desktop clock
6. In Windows Vista, one can add additional running clocks which belong to different country regions, to the system tray. To do this, Click on the clock, and click date time settings. Select the Additional clocks tab. Here, one can add one or two clocks to the system tray and set their time zones.
7. This is a general tip, which I would like to mention here. It applies to all operating systems. Don’t save your work in default documents folder or in drive where your operating system is installed. There are 90% chances of operating system getting corrupted. Once the OS gets corrupted, the drive in which the operating system installed needs to be formatted. The data will get lost, if done so. So, it is to be on safer side, not to put your important work in the default drive or in the default Documents folder which is created by the operating system itself.
8. One can save the progress of the games, a feature, which was not existed with the earlier versions of Windows.
Parental control
9. Parental control is the important feature that Windows introduced with Vista. Make use of the feature from control panel to control the activities of your kids. Parents can go and work happily without worrying about the child who is using the computer.
10. In Windows Vista, one can easily create XML documents which are more secure than your regular text files. What you need to do is, create a document in any word processor and print the same via the options menu and print using XPS printer.
11. Windows Vista consumes lot of memory and resources. So, when you upgrade your system for being compatible with Vista, you should go for a graphics card with as much as 1 GB of memory in it. Vista takes a lot of graphics memory for rendering 3D objects, etc.
12. One can include Microsoft’s online databases while performing a search in Windows Vista. One can click on the online status of the search to include or not to include the online database while searching.
13. Now, the games are saved in the separate folder called the Games folder. From within this folder, one can launch games, update games by using the latest patches, enable parents to control their kids from playing games. One can invoke it by clicking Start > Games.
14. Windows Vista can make things faster and better. It is the ReadyBoost feature, which allows one to use flash memory cards or drives, to boost up the memory.
Forgot the password, No problem
15. Forgot the password of login? Don’t worry; you can still login to your computer. When starting windows, login screen appears. Press CTRL+ALT+Del two times without a break in between. You will get a dialog box which prompts you to type user name and password. Type “Administrator” as user name, leave password filed blank, and press enter. Now you have logged in as Administrator, and you can create a new account for login.
16. With Windows Vista, the main component in Windows called as Windows Explorer got enhanced. It has over 250 columns as compared to Windows XP which has only 45 columns, which covers the multitude of metadata.
17. Did you use the icon which is in the upper left corner of windows to close the window or application? Today, in Windows Vista, the icon has disappeared, but, the functionality exists in hidden form. Still you can close the window in the same manner by double clicking left corner of windows. But, I guess that, it is one of the programming or design blunder committed by Microsoft. Without the icon, how can one make use of the feature? Ask people at Microsoft about this.
18. For new users, who have used earlier version of Windows Vista, will be in deep shock to see the disappearance of Program menu. The new Program Menu shows the list of recently used programs, which can be cleared. You can get access to programs by performing a search through search box, which is made directly available.
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