Windows Vista by default shows the most recently used programs on the start menu, and there's a submenu for recently used files.
Call me a privacy nut, but I've never been a fan of having either one show up.
Right-click on the Start button, and then click Properties. You should immediate see this dialog:
Back in the old days, there were a lot of places an application could hook itself to run at startup. You had to check the registry in more than one place, as well as your start menu. With Windows Vista, there's a built-in panel that handles all that for you.To quickly get to this panel, you can open Control Panel, and then type "startup" into the search box. The link for "Stop a program from running at startup" shows up immediately. You could have also opened Windows Defender and fooled around with the menus until you find the right spot, but this seems quicker to me.
The Windows Vista start menu search box is one of my favorite features in Vista, but searching can be pretty slow if you have a lot of personal files, because by default the start menu search also searches files, windows contacts, windows mail, history, and favorites. You can customize the search results returned in the Start menu search box to only return the results that you want. I personally only want to use the start menu search to pull up applications, so I disabled everything else.
As it promised, Microsoft Corp. yesterday started sending Windows Vista users an update that identifies illegal copies of the operating system installed with cracks that the company will disable when it distributes Service Pack 1 ( Vista SP1) in two weeks.
Last Thursday, Microsoft announced the update, which detects two common cracks used to activate pirated copies of Vista, and said it would hit Windows Update (WU) within a week. Users who have left Vista's recommended WU settings alone will receive the update automatically. Others, said Microsoft, must enable Automatic Update within Vista or manually call up WU from the Start menu.
February 27 is a big day. Windows Server 2008 will be officially launching in Los Angeles with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, kicking off in just a few hours.
In support of this very important technology milestone as well as the Windows Vista SP1 release, the Microsoft Solution Accelerators Team has just released the third-generation of the agent-less infrastructure assessment platform called Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator 3.0 (or simply MAP). Through the use of remote WMI calls and secure inventory engines, the MAP tool enables you to quickly inventory a wide variety of networks (AD-managed, IP ranges, and workgroups), securely assess IT environments of servers, desktops, applications and devices, and auto-generate specific and actionable reports and proposal documents in a matter of hours.
Windows Server 2008, which was released earlier this month, was officially launched today. Windows Server 2008 brings many eagerly anticipated admin-pleasing features such as a stripped-down mode called "Server Core" that does away with many unnecessary features that are normally installed, and a new virtualization platform—"Hyper-V"—that should increase Microsoft's foothold in this increasingly important market sector. Windows Server 2008 wasn't the only product to be launched today either; Visual Studio 2008 also saw its official launch, even though it has been finished and available since November, and some fanfare was made about SQL Server 2008, though that won't be finished until later in the year.
The Windows Vista BootScreen is pointless, but Microsoft decided to hide a more visually appealing boot screen that can easily be enabled with very little trouble. I'm not sure why they didn't make the boot screen better. In this article, we will find out the hidden boot screen in vista . I promise it is fantastic.
Every time you delete a file, Windows Vista asks you "Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?"
This is typically a good thing, to prevent you from deleting files by accident, but if you are trying to do some cleanup and need to delete a lot of files, you might not want to be prompted every single time. In addition, when you empty the recycle bin, still there is a confirmation dialog . So i think there is no need to confirm twice.
If you are experiencing weird issues after upgrading your hardware, or you've just upgraded to the latest hardware device and aren't seeing the performance you'd like, you might want to remove the old drivers which are still installed for the old hardware, even though you can't normally see them in device manager.What you have to do is set a less-known flag to allow you to see non-present devices, and then launch device manager. You'll then see the old devices in the list, and can uninstall the drivers for them.
Microsoft has released KB940510, in which when installed, it will "enable Windows Vista to detect software that bypasses product activation and interferes with normal Windows operations" (quoted from Windows Update)
Here is the information:
