Windows Vista tutorials

An easy way to give your Windows Vista box a clean look is to remove the application labels on the taskbar. With a registry hack you can make your Windows Vista taskbar look similar to the Windows 7 icon only taskbar.

1. Click on the start button and type in regedit and hit Enter.
2. Navigate through HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop\WindowMetrics.
3. Create a String value and call it MinWidth
4. Set the value of MinWidth to 56
5. Restart

In Windows Vista the networking components were designed to be much more intelligent and automatically adjust the network settings to optimize the connection speed. This is a great new feature. Your network components basically tweak themselves for optimal performance. In most situations, these components automatically adjust perfectly for best performance. However, with wireless WAN cards the detection of network conditions is flawed and can result in slower network performance.

To fix this problem, Microsoft has released a hotfix for users affected by this issue. If you have a Wireless WAN device, I suggest you give this hotfix a try.

KB 940646 details:

This problem occurs because of the way that TCP receive window auto tuning is used in Windows Vista for connections that only receive data.

Windows Vista obtains a round-trip time (RTT) estimate at the time of connection setup and every time that a new segment of data that is transmitted. A connection that only receives data is limited to the single RTT sample that is obtained at the time of connection setup. Because the connection only receives data, the connection cannot "converge" to the actual RTT of the connection. For example, because the RTT data may fluctuate for various reasons, a "converge" operation is performed to estimate a meaningful RTT by using blending current and previous RTT data. However, if the connection cannot converge to the actual RTT of the connection, the bandwidth delay product (BDP) estimate that Vista obtains is also incorrect. Therefore, the connection's receive window is limited, and throughput of the connected transmission network is reduced.

The new Aero interface is not provided in "Windows Vista Home Basic Edition", all other editions provide this new cool interface.

But there is a registry trick to enable the Aero interface in Vista Home Basic edition too.

1. Open regedit and goto:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM

2. In right-side pane change value of "Composition" to 1 and "CompositionPolicy" to 2.

3. Restart your system and you'll be able to select the Aero interface from Desktop Properties.

With the release of Vista, Microsoft has developed a new method of animation in explorer instead of AVIs (Video Clip)

Open a new text document, now make sure to save it as ITO.reg it really doesn't matter what you call it as long as it ends in .reg

Now we need to copy and past into this document the following

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"