Microsoft Talk

Just learning about Windows Vista? Now updated with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is easier, safer, and gives you more entertainment choices than earlier versions of Windows. Want examples? Here are ten of the coolest things you can do:

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks
You don’t need to remember folder names to be organized anymore. Save time by instantly tracking down any document, photo, e-mail message, song, video, file, or program on your PC using Instant Search.

2. See everything you have open at a glance
Have you lost track of what files and programs you’ve opened? Flip through all your open files and windows with a simple click of your mouse using Windows Flip 3DA—you’re just one click away from everything you’re working on.

3. Keep photos organized—and ready to share
Is your collection of digital photos getting out of hand? You don’t have to search through folders to track down the ones you want. Now you can tag your photos with a date, keyword, rating, or any label you choose so you can find them quickly and easily in Windows Photo Gallery.

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree
Making a great home movie just got easier. Use Windows Movie Maker to blend videos and photos into a rich movie, complete with your own soundtrack, titles, and credits.

5. Keep track of your music—and play it anywhere
The larger your collection of digital music grows, the harder it can be to organize and keep track of it. But now you can easily scroll, flip, browse through, and play your entire music library in Windows Media Player 11. You can even create new playlists of your favorite tracks with a single click.

(more…)

How many times have you been watching a long video on your computer and had the screensaver come on? Then you play the game of trying to jiggle the mouse every certain number of minutes to make sure it doesn’t happen again…  seems like it would be easier to have a really quick way to disable the screensaver.

Our solution comes in the form of a little utility named flipss.exe which can be used to easily enable or disable the screensaver via a command line argument… we’ll just have to manually create shortcuts for each task.

Create Disable/Enable Shortcut

Right-click on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

You will need to enter in the full path to where you saved the flipss.exe file, followed by either "/off" or "/on". For instance, if you saved the utility in C:\MyFiles you would use this path to create the disable icon:

C:\MyFiles\flipss.exe /off

On the next screen you’ll need to give it a useful name, and then create a second shortcut with "/on" which you can use to turn the screensaver back on.

You can give them different icons by going into the properties for the shortcut and choosing the "Change Icon" option. Personally I moved the icons into the quick launch bar for easier access and indexing in Launchy.

Download Flipss.zip from jddesign.f2s.com

Source | PowerPoint Tip: Copy a presentation to a CD or anyhwere | Word: Compatibility Pack for End Users

If you are using Office 2007, don’t bother opening the file just to view it’s content.

Use the preview pane in Windows Vista to view all parts of your document, and even copy content, directly from Windows Explorer. Notice, for example, the data selected in the preview of a sample Excel workbook in the image that follows.

To open the Preview pane, on the Start menu click Computer to open a Windows Explorer window, or press Windows+E. On the Windows Explorer toolbar, click Organize, point to Layout, and then click Preview. Note that once the Preview pane is open, you can drag the left edge of the pane to reduce or increase its size.

Vista Tips, Office 2007 tips, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Vista Tips, Office 2007 tips, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Here’s how to configure Windows to by pass AutoPlay dialog box and launch Windows Explorer when you insert your USB key in.

1. Insert your flash drive into the USB port.
2. When you see the AutoPlay dialog box, click Cancel.
3. Open My Computer, right-click your flash drive icon, and select Properties.
4. In the Properties dialog box, select the AutoPlay tab.
5. Perform the following steps for each item in the Content Type drop-down list:
   - Select an item in the Content Type drop-down list.
   - Choose Select An Action To Perform in the Actions panel.
   - Select the Open Folder To View Files In Windows Explorer action.
   - Click the Apply button.
6. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.

Windows Explorer, USB, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Windows Explorer, USB, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Aaron shares a scripting technique that allows you to elevate to admin any given process, from the command line or in a script.

Script is written in JavaScript, which needs be placed in your user’s PATH (i.e., any directory mapped in the PATH variable) and executed from the command line.

In Vista activate a command with this script, and the UAC prompt will appear as it would if you’d manually launched the program as admin.

Vista Tip, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Vista Tip, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

If you have experienced file copying operation to be a pain in Windows Vista, then refer to this Microsoft KB.

Paul’s got a tip for you. Excerpt from his blog post:

I looked at the Folder Options under Control Panel and noticed the very first setting under the View tab: Always show Icons, never Thumbnails. It was not checked. I realized that Vista must read each file when opening the folder for a thumbnail and/or creates one. When I checked the Always show Icons, never Thumbnails, it reduced the time required to open each folder to 3 or 4 seconds.

That’s awesome. Thanks Paul. I am sure we all appreciate this workaround.

Vista, Vista Tip, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Vista, Vista Tip, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Over at Connected Internet, Everton Blair, shares a cool Vista Fix to resolve file copying problems in Windows Vista.

To Turn off Auto-Tuning:

1. press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open the Command Prompt. Choose run as admin

type in: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
2. Reboot

If you have any problems, then to turn auto-tuning back on type the following in Command Prompt:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Thanks Everton

Apparently this is a topic of discussion in Microsoft Forums. It is listed as a bug in KB931770

So follow any of the methods to resolve this issue.
Method 1 - Download the fix from somewhere else:

Hotfix has the files for the fix available for download:

32-bit Windows Vista

64-bit Windows Vista

Method 2 - Use Total Commander:
A Neowin member claimed that this program managed to speed up file transfers. The program he used was called Total Commander, which can be downloaded here.

Select the directory from the drop down menu in the top-left corner and just drag and drop. When a prompt window comes up, just choose OK and the transfer will proceed.

In Windows Vista, system restore size has been set at 15% of the hard drives capacity. If you had a 100GB hard drive, that converts to 1500MB for System Restore. You don’t need that.

So use this tip to change system restore size in Windows Vista.

Open the command line and use the following command to change the size of System Restore in Windows Vista:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=4GB0

This would change the allocated size of System Restore on drive C: for drive C: to 4 gigabytes. Please note that the on: parameter is the drive letter where the System Restore files are stored while the for: parameter defines the drive that the files should be backed up from. The maxsize parameter is pretty obvious. It can’t go below 300 Megabytes. If you remove the maxsize parameter the settings will be changed to the default ones again.

If you select a size that is lower than the current amount of space the oldest entries in System Restory will be deleted first.

Via gHack