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…

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…

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…

Some people don’t like any icons on their desktop. If this is you, simply right-click your desktop, choose View from the menu, and choose Show Desktop Icons, which will turn them off if they are currently on. Other people don’t mind the icons, they just would prefer not to have the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop. In that case, here’s how to turn it off:

1. Right-click on your desktop and choose Personalize
   
2. Click on the Change Desktop Icons link in the upper left hand corner Read more…

What good is a computer without some games to waste time with? What better game to waste time with than Solitaire? Well, Vista has Solitaire, and it’s improved from previous versions. Nice graphics, sounds, and even animation, the effects will make you feel like you’re really there, with yourself, playing cards.
As you can see from my game above, they still haven’t fixed it so you can win every time, but there is a cheat. If you’d prefer to draw just one card from the deck, instead of the default of three, the Realtime-Vista blog suggests you press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT while clicking the deck for a new card. I also tried their other suggestion, ALT+SHIFT+2, which is supposed to automatically win the game, but found that it doesn’t work.

When I shutdown my computer, I tend to walk away, so it really doesn’t matter how long it takes. If there is some reason that you hang around and wait for it to shutdown (perhaps waiting to close the lid on a laptop), then you may want the shutdown process to be a little faster. When Vista, like older versions of Windows, is told to shutdown, there is a set amount of time that it waits for things like services to properly shutdown. You can control how long it waits through a simple registry setting.

When automakers program your cars computer, they are fairly conservative, choosing settings that will work for most people, but that also sacrifice performance in favor of good mileage, smooth running on cheap gas, or longevity of parts. Some would gladly buy premium gasoline, or replace parts a little more frequently in exchange for the increased performance. Windows is similar. Microsoft chose default settings that are ’safe’ for the ‘average’ user. If you’re reading this, you are probably not the average user.

It should be mentioned that you will need to modify your registry, and doing this can be dangerous. If you modify the wrong setting in the wrong way, you could prevent something from working correctly, or even make Vista unable to boot, so proceed with caution! To help avoid trouble, and to simplify your task, instead of using Regedit to directly modify your registry, we’ll instead create a batch file that will do it for you.

Open Notepad, or any other text editor that can create a simple text file. Copy the following text, and paste it into the Notepad window:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]
"WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="20000"

Save the file with the name WaitToKill.reg (or any other name you like, as long as it ends with .reg). You’re not done yet. As it stands, this file won’t do anything because the value you see there, 20000, is the default value that you are currently using. The value 20000 amounts to about 20 seconds. Change that value to something smaller to shorten the wait time (don’t forget to save after changing the value).

Once the file is saved, double-click it and you’ll be prompted by UAC to allow it to run.

Then you’ll be warned about the dangers of modifying the registry, click Yes to allow it to run.

You’ll then be told that the modification was successfully made to your registry.

A reboot will be required before the change will take affect.

So what should you set this to? Browsing around some forums suggests that 3000 to 5000 (3 to 5 seconds) seems to work OK for most, and though some claim they’ve had no problems with 1000 (1 second), others have said it made their computer ‘unbootable’ after a few tries. So why not set it to zero? If you set the time too short, there is a chance that a service might not shutdown properly, and could loose data. Of particular concern would be services that write to the registry (as I mentioned above, messing up the registry can make for a very bad day!). So, keep in mind that with this change comes the benefit of a faster shutdown, but also a degree of risk should you set the time to short.

Just recently I got a laugh out of a post called “But I Don’t Want to be a Flower!“, a funny title that I associated with Seinfeld. The post actually has a nice, quick tip on how to change that ‘flower’ icon you get on your Vista login screen and in your ‘Start’ menu. Here’s how I changed my icon, not just to one of the stock icons, but to me!

1. That post was right, I don’t want to be a flower! Open your ‘Start’ menu and click on the evil flower icon
   
2. In the User Accounts window, click Change your picture Read more…