AdventuresInVista
Hints, Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Windows Vista

Tuesday Tweak - Vista Battery Saver
15 July 2008 in Maintenance & Tuesday Tweaks | Comments (0)

So, you’ve downloaded the Vista Battery Tracker, and now you’re thinking “I wonder if I can get any more juice out of my battery?”. Well, thanks to this tip from my friend Dave, I have a peice of software which could save up to 70% of your battery usage.

The Vista Battery Saver (download here) claims it can do this by “disabling those nice but greedy Vista features” - things like the Aero interface, for example.

Here it is in action…

You could probably achieve the same performance enhancements manually, but this small download gives you a quick and easy interface to tweak your battery usage.

UPDATE Thanks to Dave Webb, who mentioned this in a comment on yesterday’s post, ‘Vista Battery Checker‘. Coincidence, eh?

Download Vista Battery Saver now!

Vista SP1 Released to Windows Update + My Thoughts
19 March 2008 in Maintenance | Comments (0)

Earlier today, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released to Windows Update.

If your computer is set to download updates automatically - you’ve probably already at least started to download it, if not installed it already.

Since the MSDN release, SP1 seems to have shrunk somewhat, coming in at a mere 66.9 megabytes. Good news for all those with slow connections.

Go download it now from Windows Update!

Vista Service Pack 1 released to MSDN subscribers
21 February 2008 in Maintenance | Comments (0)

It has been noted on a few Vista blogs that Service Pack 1 RTM (Ready To Manufacture) had appeared as a download on MSDN.

As an MSDN subscriber, I can confirm this, and report my installation experience.

The download itself is about 447mb, and once that’s done, there is just 1 file to launch.

After you’ve accepted the terms, and clicked Next and Continue a couple of times, the automatic installation process starts. A few restarts later and your machine is ready to go.

The installation warns that it could take up to an hour, but in reality that was more like 30 minutes, which isn’t bad. At no point was I left thinking “um.. has it broke?”.

Once restarted, nothing much appears to have changed on first glance. A couple of my icons have been moved about, but apart from that… I can’t tell the difference!

I’ll let you know how I get on…..

How To Guage Defragmentation Time in Vista
19 July 2007 in Help & Tips & Maintenance | Comments (1)

So yesterday I needed to unistall some software from one of my machines. SQL Server wouldn’t work with Visual Studio so I decided to uninstall everything, scandisk, defrag and reinstall.

A simple job, 3 hours tops. Or at least that was the theory…

Turns out the new version of Defragmenter doesn’t tell you anything useful. It doesn’t even give you a percentage bar or anything. So it’s just sitting there, making a noise…