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).
   
4. Finally, press Enter to activate the OK button, which will restart, shutdown, switch user, or logoff.

So, +D then ALT+F4 then R then Enter will restart your Vista machine, a few more keys than in XP, but at least it’s still an option.

At the end of the day I always like to close the open applications to prepare my computer for the next day. Since I rarely reboot my desktop, I manually close each application. Depending on the number of open applications this can be a waste of time.   The people at NTWind Software have a perfect utility for this situation aptly called Close All Windows. Instead of manually closing each application just click the Close All Windows button on your taskbar.

In this article I will show you how to install and configure Close All Windows on your computer for easy access on the taskbar.

To get started head over to NTWind Software and download the latest version of Close All Windows.

After the file is downloaded extract the CloseAll folder to a permanent location on your computer.  Since Close All Windows is an application I extracted the folder to C:\Program Files\ where applications are typically installed.

For easy access it is best to pin the application to the taskbar. Drag the Close All Windows application from the CloseAll folder onto the taskbar.

Congratulations, you are now more efficient.

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.

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).

To quickly create a shortcut to the location you are viewing, right click anywhere to the right of the path in the address bar and select Copy Address. That will put the text of the path on your clipboard, allowing you to switch to your desktop, right click and select Paste Shortcut (or wherever you want to place it). Since the path is stored on your clipboard, it can also be pasted in a document, e-mail and so on.

If you’re in a deeply nested folder where the address bar does not have room to show the entire path, click on the double arrows to the left of the first item. Clicking that will show the parent folders that do not actually fit on the address bar.

Another feature found, to the right of the Back and Forward buttons (just before the address bar), is the Recent Items drop down button. Items displayed in this list are recently visited locations you can select to jump to the location in Explorer that you need to navigate through.

One more thing: clicking anywhere on the address bar and typing in a URL, such as http://www.vistacompanion.com, will launch your Web browser and open the Web site you specified. Enjoy!

~ Ramachandran Kumaraswami

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)

b) Open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, then Right click on ‘Inbound Rules’ and select New Rule….

c) Select ‘ Custom’ –> ‘All Programs’

d) in Protocol type, select ‘ICMPv4? from drop down box, click next…

e) Make sure in both places ‘Any IP address’ selected, click next…

f) Select ‘Allow the connection’, click next..

g) Leave the three check boxes selected as mentioned below and click next…

h) In this screen give any name to this rule, such as ‘ Echo request’ or ‘Ping request’…which will be shown as a inbound rule.

i) Click Finish. That’s is it. These steps help in enable ping in vista  (Echo request or ICMP packets) in your Windows Vista computer without disabling the defaultfirewall.

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.

· In the properties window click on the Security tab then click on Edit.

· On the Permissions window click on the Add button to open the Select Users Group or Groups window.

· On the Select Users or Groups window you can enter the usernames of the accounts you want apply the restrictions.

· If you are not sure of the usernames click on the Advanced button to open a search window. In the search window click on the Find Now button to display all the available usernames. Click on the user then click OK.

· On the Permissions window you can now set the permissions to deny/allow by checking the checkbox under the deny/allow option.

· On the security window that will pop up click OK.

· The access permissions for the folder will now be applied.  As you can see deny entries take precedence over allow entries.  Be sure to remember this rule as it causes confusion for a lot of new users.

In the example above, I set all permissions for the guest user to deny.  This means a guest account will not be able to modify or even read the contents of the folder.  If guest log’s in to the PC or connects to the folder using LAN, the guest account will not be allowed to see the contents of the folder.

This is useful if you have multiple accounts setup on your computer, i.e. for kids or other family members, but want to prevent others for accessing a folder.

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.

Word on the street has it that using this manual defrag command “defrag c: -b” at the command prompt, where c: is your primary boot drive, will defrag the boot files and move them so Vista will start faster.  The problem with this method is there is no progress bar so you just have to sit and wait for it to finish.  People wonder why I don’t like command line and command line tools, this is one of those reasons, basically I always need to know when/how soon something will finish or at least get a rough estimate from a progress bar.

The built-in defrag utility of Vista is just as lame as the command line version, it will only notify you when it is complete.  My favorite paid options for a defrag utility are Perfect Disk and Diskeeper but if you can’t/don’t want to pay for one then it’s hard to be Auslogics Disk Defrag which is compatible with Windows 2000, 2003, XP and Vista.

Even if defragging doesn’t really help your boot performance (this will vary) it will still help improve application load times when the operating system is finally booted up.

That covers booting but there is one quick edit to the registry that can make Vista shut down quicker than you can say “shut down.”  Those not comfortable with delving in to the registry had better not proceed because making a mistake here could (and usually does) mess up your system bad.

At the Start Menu, type “regedit” without the quotes in the search box and hit Enter.  Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control and go to the Control folder, right click the entry “WaitToKillServiceTimeout” and set the value to something lower, 1000 is usually good (the numbers represent milliseconds).  The default value is a (too) generous 20000.  However, the cost with this is that it won’t give running programs much time to save data so losing work using the tweak is a definite possibility.

There are some more tweaks that can be found right here but many of them (save for the one above) can be done automatically by the free version of TweakVI.

Privacy features such as InPrivate browsing in Internet Explorer 8 and similar features in Chrome and Firefox promise to protect your privacy by not keeping track of page history, temporary files and cookies. This may be enough to hide your tracks from a beginner computer user but there are still traces of what sites you visit within the local DNS cache. An advanced user can run the ipconfig /displaydns command to view the most recent sites visited.

For example, when you start InPrivate browsing in Internet Explorer and visit Bing.com.

The DNS Cache shows where you have been.

The best way to improve the privacy of your InPrivate browsing sessions is to also clear the local DNS cache after closing the browser. Open up an administrative level command prompt and type ipconfig /flushdns and hit Enter. ]]> http://www.vistacompanion.com/make-private-browsing-more-private/feed/ 0 http://www.vistacompanion.com/autologin-on-vista/ http://www.vistacompanion.com/autologin-on-vista/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 10:26:16 +0000 admin http://www.vistacompanion.com/?p=76 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.
   
4. You will be prompted for the login name and password of the user that you want automatically logged in. Enter the information for a user account that already exists and click OK.
   

That’s it! A couple things to keep in mind:

• You should always have a password assigned, even if you are automatically logging in, to help prevent remote access to your machine
• If your machine is physically accessible to others, setting your machine to automatically login will allow them the same access that you have, not recommended for work!

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.
   
4. You get the option for When I press the power button:, which has a drop-down containing Do nothing, Sleep, Hibernate and Shut Down. I, of course, choose Shut Down.
   
5. Then, just click Save Changes, close the open windows, and your finished!