Vista Keyboard Shortcuts

Added some Vista keyboard shortcuts to my collection of Windows Keyboard Shortcuts.

Vista First Impressions Again

After getting over the difficulty of transferring all my files from my old PC to the new one, here's my first impressions of Vista compared to XP:

• Definitely lots of eye candy. The semi-transparent borders are neat. Shadow around each window softens their edges.
• Text display is very clear. Can't tell if it's because of the new computer or improvements in font display. Where's the option to tweak font appearances?
• Windows Sidebar takes up too much desktop real estate. Until I can find a useful gadget, I turned it off.
• System administration tasks are better integrated with Control Panel. The related tasks in each window are helpful.
• Internet Explorer 7.0 now has tabbed browsing, but Windows Explorer doesn't. Trying to opening a folder in MSIE7 just opens yet-another Explorer window. Isn't it obvious that Explorer should have tabbed views to improve file and folder management? Stick with 2xExplorer!
• Tablet PC input device is standard. No idea how to enable it for the touchpad or a tablet device.
• What, Powershell not installed by default?
• Windows Media Player is less annoying than previous versions that wanted to go on-line all the time.

Windows Vista First Impressions

Started playing with Windows Vista Home Premium (that's a mouthful). First thing I noticed was the eye candy. Desktop is very pretty. Second thing I noticed was how slow network transfers were. So slow that nothing happened when I tried to transfer files from my old computer to my new one.

Applied the following tweaks from Top 10 Vista Speed Tweaks.

1. Disabled Indexing. I choose Google Desktop for indexing my computer.
2. Turned of Remote Differential Compression.
3. Turned off Windows Defender.
4. Disk Defragmentation is not scheduled.
5. Didn't try the USB boost option.
6. Didn't try the Hibernation option.
7. Left System Restore feature running. It seems like good insurance.
8. Disabled User Account Control (UAC). Those Apple Get a Mac - Security ads were spot-on. UAC is such a pain in the neck if you want to do anything remotely resembling system administration.
9. Disabled some unused services.

I also did the following:

• Turned off Remote Assistance.
• Removed Symantec Norton. This program also installed its own network adapters. Speed improved from less than 1 MB/sec to 2.3 MB/sec, which is about 50% the speed of my wireless router. Good enough for transferring my files from one computer to another.
• Turned off the Firewall. My router has a hardware firewall and I prefer Sygate software firewall.

Disable Compressed Folders

Here's how to disable Windows Explorer's compressed folder view. Basically, start cmd shell, then enter regsvr32 /u zipflr.dll. It's annoying (conceptual overloading, anyone?) when only ZIP files, rather than all compressed files are listed with normal folders in the right pane.