Windows Vista Hidden Secrets

Arafath Hashmi | April 1, 2008 | 0 Comments

Over few months have passed Windows Vista was released and you might have read fast track to Windows Vista. Here comes lots of Tips&Tricks to simplify things and spice of your Vista experience. Explore the hidden secrets of Windows Vista.

Speed Up Vista with Ready Boost

Windows Vista comes with a new feature, Ready Boost which lets you plug in your flash drive or SD card to store commonly-used files for quicker access than from the Hard Drive. Just stick in the USB Drive or SD card or any other Flash device.In the Auto play dialog that pops up, my system link, which takes you to the Ready Boost configuration panel. Select Use this device, and set the amount of space you want to use. Windows will create a paging file of that size on the disk.

Enable Additional Clock In Vista

Enable Additional Clocks there’s an Enhancement to the system Clock in Vista which lets you display two additional clocks when you hover your mouse over the system tray clock [ To keep track of time in a different time zone].To add a Clock, right-click on the clock in the system tray and select Adjust date/time. Click the Additional Clocks Tab, Check the show this Clock box, select the new time zone, And give it a convenient name.

Speed Up SATA Hard Drives In Vista

Windows Vista, By default, doesn’t enable the advanced write Caching feature of SATA Hard Drives. You can considerably Speed Up your SATA Hard Drive by enabling this.
Open Device manager by running devmgmt.msc. Open the Disk drives section of the tree, right-click on your hard drive listed there, and select the Policies tab. Check the box next to Enable Advanced Performance.

3D Benchmarking In Vista

Vista has a cool inbuilt 3D Benchmark. This is included in the system assessment tool, which benchmarks your system during installation.
But you can run this Benchmark from the command line by using winsat along with command line parameters. The Complete list is as below. Think of this as an Easter Egg…. Try then and see what they do!

winsat aurora
winsat d3d -texshader -totalobj 15
winsat d3d -objs C(20) -texshader -totalobj 50
winsat d3d -total obj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(10) -alushader -v -time 10
winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(1) -alushader -noalpha -v -time 10

Gadgets Without the side bars

The side bar is a Bit of a Distraction and occupies too much Desktop Space.
But you probably do like some of the Gadgets that come with it. You can run these Gadgets without the need of the side bar: just drag and drop one to the desktop, right -click anywhere on the clear part of the side bar and choose Close Side bar. Now the Gadgets shall be running continuously.

Share Folders As Easily As In XP

In Vista, when you right-click on a folder and click Share, a Wizard starts, which is meant to make things easier, but in a reality is a bit of confusing for many ex-XP users .You cannot choose the share name and will instead be assigned a weird name such as..
\\ computer \ users \ user name\ Data. To share in the XP way, click Properties instead of Share. Select the Sharing tab and click Advanced Sharing. Check the box against Share this folder and choose a share name. You can also set permissions here.

Hide The Floppy Drive

You no longer use a Floppy Drive these days, so there’s no reason for it to be displayed in My computer. Open the Registry Editor and go to ..
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer
If this key doesn’t exist, create it. The modify or create a 32-bit DWORD named No drives. Assign it a value of 1.

Assign A Hot Key To The Snipping Tool

Vista comes with a nifty screen shot Utility called the Snipping Tool, which can capture all or parts of the screen. Problem is, the tool has no provision for a hot key to bring up the windows .
In the Start menu, click on All Programs and then the Accessories folder, and you’ll see the Snipping Tool. Right- click on it and select Properties. You’ll see an empty Shortcut key text box, in which you can place the mouse cursor and press a hot key such as [Ctrl] + [F12].

Symlinks in Vista

One of the interesting features of Linux-Symbolic links finally makes an appearance in Windows. You can create symlinks using the Command-line Utility mklink.
The syntax is as below :
MKLINK [[/D] / [/H] / [/J]] Link Target

Where:
/D Creates a directory symbolic link (soft link). Default is a file symbolic link
/H Creates a hard link ( link to a file) instead of a symbolic link
/J Creates a Directory Junction link Specifies the path ( relative or absolute) that the new link refers to…

For example, if you want to make

D:\ Data to be available from the folder
D:\ Maindata, use C:\mklink/D
D:\ Main Data D:\ Data

If you now look in D:\Maindata, you will see whatever files were in the other directory.

User UAC ( User Access Control)

User Access Control is that annoying thing keeps on popping up tirelessly to ask you ifit is OK to install a particular program when you try to install one. It is one of the biggest irritants in Vista, but we must warn you that disabling it will render your system less secure.
Open the control Panel, type in user account in the search box, and press [Enter]. You’ll see the links for Turn User Access Control (UAC) on or off. Click it. Uncheck the box, reboot your computer, and you will no longer be bothered by UAC. There is an even faster way to disable UAC from the command line: use

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k%widir%\System32\reg.exe ADD
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v
EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d o /f
For the security-conscious, we’d suggest an alternative method. In this one, only the UAC of the Administrator account is disabled; other users will go through the same security mechanism as before. Open the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Create a 32-bit DWORD
Consent prompt behavior Admin and set its value to 0. Restart. What actually happens here is, You elevate the privilege level for the Administrator.

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