Egil Hansen

I just recently installed Vista on my work PC, and have since been looking for different ways to get more out of Vista. Here is a (continually updated) list of my favourite Vista tricks and tweaks. Usability tricks and tweaks:

• Wictor describes how you can customize the Favourite Links in Windows Vista common dialogs, which is a lot simpler then completing the same feat in Windows XP.
• Symbolic Links has finally made its way into the Windows family. Microsoft describes a “symbolic link is a file-system object that points to another file system object”, which can be sort of abstract to say the least. What it basically means is that you can go into C:\Users\Egil\Current Project\ and it will be the same as going in to C:\Users\Egil\Document\Customer\2007\Project Name\. In other words, C:\Users\Egil\Current Project\ is a symbolic link to C:\Users\Egil\Document\Customer\2007\Project Name\, it is just a shorter path which safes me mouse clicks. Think of it as an advanced way of creating shortcuts to things. The official documentation for symbolic links can be found on MSDN. If my explanation just confused you, give Wikipedia’s a try.

Performance tricks and tweaks:

• On TweakVista there is a short guide in getting a bit more speed out of your SATA disks. Microsoft recommends only using this option if your disks have a backup power supply, like a battery in a laptop, otherwise you might lose data.
• Ever wondered why Vista suddenly starts hugging the hard disk around 01:00 on Wednesdays? Well the answer could be the scheduled defragging included in Vista (at least Business and Ultimate). If you are comfortable in handling your own defragging, go in to Task Scheduler and disable that “service”.
• Out of the box Vista has a lot of enabled services, which can be safely disabled, especially if you are not a corporate laptop user. The very geeky but always reliable Black Viper has always been the place to turn to, for a service guide for your favourite Windows edition.

Visual tricks and tweaks:

• Vista comes with a rather big border size by default, more precisely a total of 4 pixels is wasted on every side of windows, dialog boxes… well everything that is boxed in Vista. Luckely, this is easily customized. I personally just set the border size to 0.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 1:00 and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.