Yeah, got me a business edition of Vista and I’m in the process of slicing and dicing it up. As you use it, you will quickly notice some things that drive you absolutely batty (like UAC for one). But there is some stuff out there that is fun to tweak and try. And, as usual, I immediately went off to try to find some good little tips, tricks, and tweaks for that very purpose. Here is a list of some of the things I found:
Run a Screensaver as a Desktop – Wouldn’t it be nice to run any screensaver as your desktop? That way you can have fish swimming around your icons.
Unreleased Vista Wallpaper – Here are a few wallpapers that didn’t make it into the Vista Wallpaper collection. You can download a few at the bottom.
Dreamscene Movie Desktop – If you are the proud owner of Windows Ultimate, you can display mpeg or wmv movies as your desktop. I believe this will be available very soon.
Install Vista Upgrade on a Blank Hard Drive – Gizmodo shares a way to install the upgrade version on a blank disk.
Disable User Access Protection – For the love…this thing will absolutely drive you insane if you are a power user. Turn the blasted thing off:
- Make sure you are logged in with admin rights
- Click on the Start button and go to Control Panel
- Go to “User Accounts”
- Click on your user account
- Click on “Change Security Settings”
- Uncheck “Use User Account Control to help protect your computer”
- Reboot
Ready Boost – Vista sports a nice little feature for the RAM mongers. If you are swapping files to your hard drive pretty hard (an indication you have too little RAM), and you can’t afford any more RAM, then you can use this feature. If you have a spare USB flash drive of at least 64MB that is USB 2.0, you can plug that baby in and use it as a swap file holder. Go ahead an plug it in and you should be greeted with an option to use it for Ready Boost. It will ask you if you want to speed up your system. Click on that an you’re ready to go. If it doesn’t, then you can right click on the USB device and look in the Ready Boost tab to enable it.
