vista tweaks
Bringing Back “Search…” Menu Item After Vista SP1
Because of fears on appearing anti-competitive Microsoft chose to introduce a few visual access points to Vista’s built in search in Service Pack 1. Companies such as Google felt that Microsoft’s built in search was too prominently pushed on the unaware users, who would want to use applications like Google Desktop for their local search. [...]
Improving Vista File Copying
Vista file copying performance is horrendous, even in the post Service Pack 1 world. There are a number of technical reasons as to why the actual file copy/move process was re-engineered in Vista - compared to XP - but at the end of the day it is all irrelevant because the actual process fails horribly [...]
Trim Those Control Panel Extensions with Visual Controls
Have you perused your Windows Control Panel lately? If you’re like most users you will probably find a half dozen or so third-party icons littered about the panel. Video card manufacturer NVIDIA is often guilty but software applications like Apple Quicktime or SUN Java aren’t far behind. Worse still, the pollution could be excusable if [...]
Installing Applications Outside of “Program Files” by Default
I enjoy a lean mean Vista machine. Perhaps it’s just a psychological habit, but very early on in my Windows 95 experience I began installing applications and games on a different hard drive, separate from my Windows installation. In that day and age, you’d often reinstall Windows at least once a year, if not every [...]
Adding Defrag to Right-Click in Vista
One of the new features introduced in Vista is the notion of auto defragment of your harddrive. Briefly, defragging a harddrive involves scanning the disk and relocating all the data belonging to a file so that it is contained in one continuous block. This generally causes a performance gain as it is much faster for [...]
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