Vista Tips and Tweaks, Vista/7 Tips, Vista Tutorials, Vista SP1

Federated Search, from a developers perspective, is like the search bar in Firefox and IE7. For the end user, and in this case, the student, it allows you to browse a search engine directly from your desktop, in Windows Search. So instead of searching “Everywhere” or “Indexed Locations”, why not “Flickr”, “YouTube”, or “Your university library”?

Yesterday we made the Windows 7 Beta available for public download. Hopefully you’re as excited as I am that the beta is here! The Windows 7 Beta is already getting some rave reviews for its new features, performance, and stability. But it is a beta, and with that comes the potential risk that some things may not work as well as they will in the final release.

If you were given the gift of a new laptop this Christmas, you know there’s really no better way to start the New Year. Whether it was upgrading an older notebook, or even your first computer chances are you’re expecting a huge bump in performance. If major notebook manufactures are known for anything these days, it’s filling up your shiny new machine with tons of additional software.

While Windows Vista may be Microsoft Corp.'s most secure operating system ever, it's far from completely secure. In its fresh-from-the-box configuration, Vista still leaves a chance for your personal data to leak out to the Web through Windows Firewall or for some nefarious bot to tweak your browser settings without your knowledge.

It is known to all that in Vista, system will auto hide inactive tray icons.This is a useful function. But as time goes on,these icons become more and more.You will see icons of apps that you used long ago,even the app was uninstalled.Now we will clean the history.

CD and DVD are fragile media. A few scratches here and there and they can easily become coasters on your table. I have had plenty of them myself.

Many of you will have several WLIDs, and want to sign into Messenger with more than one of them. Until now you had to seek refuge in a patch or add-on to be able to do so. Not anymore! Microsoft’s John Weisenfeld just shared a little trick with me to enable this, which I’m going to share with you.

The development milestones of Windows 7, be them pre-Beta or fully-fledged Beta, are time-bombed, as is the case with all Microsoft pre-release software. When it comes down to the Milestone 3 releases of the next iteration of the Windows client, the expiration date is officially set to August 1, 2009. This despite the operating system indicating via Winver that it will expire as early as July 1, 2009. With or without a product key, pre-release versions of Windows 7 including Build 6801 and 6956, but not earlier than 6801, can be used up until August 1, 2009.

Microsoft has released a Microsoft security advisory about this issue for IT professionals. The security advisory contains additional security-related information. To view the security advisory, visit the following Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961051.mspx To work around this problem, use any of the following methods.

One of the small details introduced in Windows Vista in comparison to Windows XP is the access method to the boot options associated with the operating system. In XP the users had to press F8 during startup in order to come across the boot options at their disposal. When it comes down to Windows Vista, this continues to be valid, however, now users can also hit the Space Bar. Moreover, Windows 7, Vista's successor, has inherited the same behavior, and pressing the Space Bar after the BIOS stops loading will deliver the Windows Boot Manager.