I personally think that some of the icons found in Windows Vista are not that great at all and decided to look for a way to replace them with better suited icons. During the search I found a website that offers icon packs for Windows Vista that look really great.
Internet Explorer 7 allows a maximum of two simultaneous downloads which might be enough for casual downloaders but is definitely not enough for users who download a lot in a short time. I’m on a very fast connection and have no problem to download 8-10 files at a time.
I was trying to find a way to shutdown Windows Vista using only the keyboard and had the problem that the method known from Windows XP was not working in Vista anymore. It remains a mystery to me why Microsoft decided to change this and remove the keyboard shortcut to shutdown in Windows Vista.
Microsoft confirmed that Vista’s Aero theme is consuming more power which leads to a faster battery drain. They say it is not that much that people should get worried but I personally feel that Aero consumes to much power. I also think that it is a pretty useless feature of Windows Vista. Sure it looks nice but that’s it. The transparency feature of Aero will be disabled whenever you switch to Power Save mode.
Just a quick tip today. If you bought or received Windows Vista Home Basic you probably have noticed that you cannot activate the Aero interface and wondered why that is the case. If you did not know, Windows Vista Home Basic does not ship with the Aero interface. That is at least what Microsoft wants you to believe. There is however a way to activate the Aero interface in this operating system.
Did you notice that Windows Vista drains notebook batteries pretty fast on some notebooks ? I was able to identify two causes for this behavior. The first is the Aero Glass Interface which somehow seems to drain batteries faster while the second are the Wireless Power Saving Settings.
In case that you want to change your Windows Vista key you do not have to reinstall Windows Vista but can use the command prompt to change it internally. You will have to activate the new key of course which can also be done by using the command prompt. To change your Windows Vista key do the following:
Windows Vista might report less RAM than you have installed on your computer. This can happen if you run a 32-bit version of Windows Vista and have 4 Gigabytes of RAM installed on it. The incorrect amount of RAM is shown in the System Properties and System Information. Many users do not know why this is reported incorrectly and demand an explanation for this behavior.
If you want to optimize your computer and disable services that you either do not need or think are a security risk you are in for some hours of pain. The information that Microsoft provides in the services menu aren’t that useful to decide on the fate of some services. I was able to turn off many services from my experience with Windows XP which I used before. Most services are similar to Windows XP which made it easy for me.
Many applications in Windows Vista need to be run in Administrator Mode to work correctly. Especially older softwares require this and it soon becomes a burden to always go the extra mile so to speak to run the application as an administrator. The How To Geek found a workaround for this. All shortcuts in Windows Vista have apparently a function to always run them in administrator mode.
