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.
You normally do not run into troubles when you only install or run Windows Vista on a computer. If you run a multi-boot system however you might face some serious problems depending on the order of installation that you choose. I for one had a problem on my triple boot system that was running Windows XP. I decided to install Ubuntu and afterwards Windows Vista.
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.
I do remember Black Vipers Internet site from the time when I first installed Windows XP on one of my computers. His site was my number 1 resource to find information about all services of Windows XP and it helped me tremendously to disable unneeded services. The same guy did publish his “Black Viper’s Top 9 tweaks for a faster (and less annoying) Vista PC” about a month ago which is a very good read if you are new to Windows Vista and want to make the most out of it.
Tweak Vi is another Windows Vista Tweaking Tool that is available in three different versions. The so called basic version is free for everyone and has a reduced functionality compared to the premium and ultimate version. Tweak Vi is using plugins to tweak Windows Vista. The basic version offers 13 free plugins while the premium version offers 8 additional plugins and the ultimate version another 7 additional plugins compared to the premium version.
Instead of searching dozens of websites to find updated or working drivers for your Microsoft Windows Vista operating system you could as easily visit the Radarsync website which has a large database of Windows Vista drivers which can be directly downloaded from that website. This is a very convenient way to download drivers without having to search for them by yourself.
