vistacompanion

One of the keyboard routines I adopted in XP was for shutting down or restarting. I’d simply press the then “U” would open the Shutdown command, and “R” would select Restart (or I could use the arrows to move to shutdown if needed), then “Enter” would enact it. I was so disappointed when I found I could no longer do that in Vista! Well, I got nice surprise today when Angie posted a tip on how to use the old Shutdown command. After playing with it I found it didn’t always work perfect, but I found a tweak to make it do what I wanted. Here’s how to do it:

1. When you’re ready to restart or shutdown, if you have any windows open press + D which will take you to your desktop. If you don’t have any other windows open, you can skip this step.
2. Press the ALT key and while holding it down, press F4, this will close the active item, or exit the active program, which is why we had to get to the desktop first, otherwise it would just close whatever window you were in. You could also just keep pressing ALT+F4 until all your windows are closed, but if you work like me, that could be a lot of times.
3. With the Shut Down Windows window open, type R if you want to restart, S if you want to switch users or shutdown (each time you type it it toggles between the two), or L to logoff. I’m going to restart, so of course I type R (not cap sensitive). Read more…

There are so many different tips and tricks that enable you to improve your user experience. Many of these can take quite a while to set up on your computer, so we’re going to give you a few helpful suggestions that will not take so long. We call these small tweaks, tweaklettes.

Go undercover
Vista has two different types of user accounts: administrator and standard It is better if potential hackers don’t know which is which, so right click computer and then click on Manage, then Local Users and Groups, then Users, then right click Administrator and rename and change the description too.

Listen to the wireless
In Vista terms (in fact in all computer terms) this means to find your wireless router and be able to fiddle around with it. Whoever is your ISP, whether www.o2.co.uk or anyone else, you just have to type 192.168.2.1 into your browser address bar, you’ll then be asked for your username and password. Once logged in you can make all the changes you want.

Go into Administration
No we don’t mean declare insolvency, this means learn to use your administrator account. Vista Ultimate or Business editions allow you to right click Management console and uncheck the Administrator’s ‘Account is disabled’ in the properties. For users of the ordinary edition, open the Command window and right click the cmd.exe then you’ll see that you have the option to Run as Administrator. If you put in net user administrator /active:yes and then log off, you’ll have see the account pop up on the screen.

Push your performance envelope
Learn how your computer is performing having a look at the Management Console. This is found by right clicking on Computer then selecting Manage, then Reliability, then Performance then look at the Reliability Monitor.

Those are our top tweaklettes for becoming more of a Vista It Guy. The tricks are relatively simple and you should really benefit from using them.

When Microsoft redesigned Windows Vista’s Windows Explorer interface, a lot more functionality was included, compared to previous versions of Windows. While some of the new functionalities are noticeable, a lot of the built in hidden features are not easily found or recognized. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about today! One in particular is featured below.

Address Bar

If you’re not used to viewing the Explorer path as a breadcrumb trail and you want to view the full path, simply left click anywhere to the right of the path in the address bar and you will see the full path displayed (in a Windows XP style). To return to the other view, you can hit the Esc key on your keyboard. (Note: To display the XP style full path, just click where the circle is shown in the address bar).

Read more…

To make sure network is working fine we use a command called ‘ ping’. This command sends ICMP packets to destination (it can be any network deceives, such as computers, print servers, routers..etc) and receives reply. This process named as ‘Echo Request’. By default in Windows Vista and XP computers this ICMP packets are blocked in default firewall settings.

Steps to Enable Ping in Vista

1) Disable the Firewall ( Not Recommended)
2) Create an exception fo ICMP packets in default firewall. To do this follow the steps…….
a) Go to Administrative Tools in control panel ( In classic view)

Read more…

Sharing folders has become a common practice in local and corporate networks.  Over the Internet, we can share our latest downloads of pictures of our favorite celebrities, MP3 collections, ripped movies (legal of course) and virtually any other file we want to share.

On a shared PC, folders outside a user’s documents and settings folder are accessible by anyone who can login to that PC.  However there are cases that we would want to restrict access to folders. In this post I will show you how to set security permissions on a folder in Windows Vista.

· Right click the folder you want to set the access permissions for and then select Properties.

Read more…

Vista, like its predecessors will be fast when you first boot it and for a few weeks after but like every other version of Windows will get slow, here are some tips to help curtail that but you will still have to do the occasional reinstall to get all your performance back.

In order to make Vista boot faster, the only thing you can really do at this point is defrag the hard drive.  After opening and closing files all the time, these files become spread in fragments all across the hard drive, increasing seek times, defragmenting puts them back into one contiguous spot and some utilities even have options for optimizing boot by placing the boot files and startup programs as close to the start of the drive as possible.

Windows XP users have the option of using BootVis but if you don’t know how to use that tool, don’t, it can really mess up your system if used wrong.  Sadly, it does not run under Vista which is a real shame because it’s an awesome utility and really does something to improve XP boot times.  Used with TuneXP (also not compatible with Vista) it’s a lethal combination for shortening boot times.

Read more…

I‘m used to having my home computer automatically login when I start it since I’m the only user. In Windows XP I used TweakUI to set this, but how do I do it in Vista? A little searching turned up this tip from Spooky on the MSFN.org forums:

1. Go to the Start Menu, type netplwiz in the search box, and press Enter
2. If you have UAC active (which you should), you’ll need to give permission for the program to start.
3. The User Accounts window will open. Notice the option Users must enter a name and password to use this computer, uncheck the box and click OK.
   Read more…

How to change the behavior of the power button. The default is to Sleep, but I prefer to actually Shut Down. It’s only seven tips later, and I’ve already got a different way to do this, mostly because it’s a few steps quicker.

1. Open the Start Menu and click on Control Panel
   
2. Click on System Maintenance
   
3. Notice under Power Options there is a link directly to Change what the power buttons do. Click on it. Read more…