Although Vista has
been available for a while now, lots of folks are still deciding
whether to make it their operating system of choice.
While the interface is pretty, you don't have to work with Vista
very long to realize that lots of things are different - and
there really aren't many new features that might be considered
compelling.
So an extended trial period with Vista is understandable before
committing to it as the operating system you will live with.
Unfortunately, Vista itself isn't easy to tame. There are
maddening pop-ups, frequent reminders to activate the operating
system, and interface elements of questionable value - all
adding up to impediments that might make you give up on the
operating system before you've given it a fair evaluation.
So what can you do to improve your life with Vista? You'll need
some Vista know-how, along with the help of some third-party
tools.
Vista's User Account Control (UAC) is may be its most
controversial feature. It's certainly one of the most
productivity sapping. Anyone who comes to Vista from a previous
version of Windows will notice almost immediately that many
actions that previously went unhindered - including installing
applications and deleting files - will now be stopped
temporarily until you dismiss a security pop-up dialog box.
These dialog boxes are intended to keep you safe, adding a
firewall, of sorts, between a potentially malicious program and
the havoc it might otherwise wreak upon your PC. But to any
moderately adept user of Windows, they server only to annoy,
adding little if anything to a good antivirus software.
Thankfully, you can either turn off or tone down UAC. To turn it
off, open the Control Panel and navigate to the User Accounts
section. Click "Turn User Account Control On or Off," and clear
the check mark on the following screen.
If you're worried that turning off UAC will leave you totally
vulnerable, you can enlist the help of
TweakUAC, a free tool that will give you the option of
putting UAC in a "quiet mode" that will suspend prompts for
anyone logged on to Vista as an administrator.
Windows Vista requires you to register or "activate" the
operating system with Microsoft within 30 days of installation.
If you don't, the OS will put the clamps on your activity by
going into "restricted mode", which allows you to do little else
other than activate the software.
There are good reasons for wanting to delay activation, however.
You might, for instance, want to try out Vista on a test machine
before committing it to a production environment. If you
activate the software and then reinstall it on another machine,
you'll probably be forced to call Microsoft when you attempt to
activate it again.
You can extend the 30-day countdown, though, with a little-known
trick. Open the Start menu, and type "cmd," without the
quotation marks. Then press Ctrl-Shift-Enter, or right-click the
cmd.exe result you see, and select Run as Administrator. Doing
either will open a command prompt window in what's known as
administrator mode.
From the command prompt, type "slmgr -rearm," without the
quotation marks, and press Enter. This restarts the 30-day
countdown to restricted mode. You can perform this "rearm" trick
three times. After that, the operating system will tell you that
the number of rearms allowed has been exceeded.
The Vista sidebar might be a neat idea, but certainly that space
on the right side of the Vista screen can be used for tools that
are more useful than an analog clock and picture viewer.
But first, if you just want to get rid of the sidebar, you can.
Right-click the sidebar or the Windows Sidebar tray icon, and
select Properties from the pop-up menu. In the resulting Windows
Sidebar Properties dialog box, clear the check box labelled
"Start Sidebar when Windows starts." From that point on, when
you start your computer, the Sidebar will be gone.
Before you say "so long" to the Sidebar, though, you might want
to try replacing the default Sidebar gadgets with some that are
truly useful.
Microsoft has gathered together a lot of gadgets at its
Windows Live
site. To install a new gadget, you just click the Download
button under the gadget you're interested in, and then click
Install from the resulting pop-up.
The new look and feel of the Windows Explorer file manager in
Vista is different enough from the "classic" Explorer that a
productivity hit is likely to result, at least in the beginning.
Unlike other elements in Vista, you really cannot revert to the
old-style Windows Explorer.
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