AdventuresInVista
Hints, Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Windows Vista

Tuesday Tweak - Adjust your font size!
15 January 2008 in Help & Tips & Tuesday Tweaks | Comments (0)

I’ve decided to start a couple of regular slots here on AdventuresInVista to group together posts of a similar nature, and provide short sharp tips.

The first of these is the ‘Tuesday Tweaks’ series - every Tuesday I’ll post a little trick or tweak to improve your Vista experience.

This week, I’m going to show you how to increase the fonts size in Windows Vista - great if you find some of text hard to read.

Continue reading…

100 million Vista licenses and more EU investigations
14 January 2008 in General | Comments (0)

Two bits of Vista-related information news today.

Firstly, Bill Gates (at his last ever CES keynote speech) announced that Vista had hit 100million licenses. That’s not bad going for an operating system that’s been out just about a year, and that apparently everybody hates!

On a more somber note for Microsoft, the European Commission has launched 2 more probes into anti-competitive business practises at Microsoft. The allegations relate to the long-running debate over the building-in of Internet Explorer into recent versions of Windows, and the apparent lack of cooperation with competitors over interoperability with Office, some server software and the dotNET Framework.

It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, given that Microsoft eventually accepted defeat (after many appeals) in it’s last case against the European Commission.

Meanwhile, it’s been quiet here at AdventuresInVista over the past few months, but look out for some design tweaks, and the new Shop coming soon! Also, I’ve just updated the About page :o)

60 million Vista licenses can’t be wrong!
27 July 2007 in General | Comments (0)

Microsoft yesterday announced that it had sold 60 million Windows Vista licenses since it’s launch in January. Pretty good going for an operating system people seem to hate with a vengeance!

Many of those will have been licenses shipped with new hardware, but a good chunk will be consumers realising the benefits of switching to Vista. A fundamentally more stable, secure, operating system.

I’m gradually installing Vista on all my machines, and as yet haven’t come across any major problems. But maybe that’s just me?

Either way, congratulations MS!

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…

Continue reading…

Vista SP1 set for a November release
10 July 2007 in General | Comments (0)

Mary Jo Foley wrote an interesting article today on ZDnet regarding the imminent release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 beta 1.

It’s interesting for 2 reasons. Obviously the fact that we now have a reasonable idea of when SP1 will be released, ie November (incidently around the same time as Windows Server 2008), but also that Microsoft are planning to release a beta of the service pack. I may be getting a tad long in tooth in terms of computing, but I’m not sure I like the idea of installing a beta (ie, test) version of a service pack!

If you’re wondering what will be included, Mary has posted a handy guide to what general consensus is expecting will be included…

• Alterations to Desktop Search to enable 3rd party search systems
• Performance tweaks to file copy, shut down, etc
• Inproved transfer performance for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
• Improvements to Bitlocker Drive Encryption system
• Improved success rate for Remote Desktop and MeetingSpace when running behind a firewall

Microsoft are saying that SP1 will focus on fixes rather than new features, so I’m sure more will be included.

I guess we’ll have to wait till November to find out (unless you care to risk installing the beta…)

Read the full article on ZDNet

Internet Explorer 7 Keyboard Shortcuts
6 July 2007 in Help & Tips & Internet Explorer 7 | Comments (0)

Continuing the series on the vast collection of keyboard shortcuts in Windows Vista, I thought I’d take a look today at the shortcuts available in Internet Explorer 7.

IE7 is of course available to users of other versions of Windows, and these keyboard shortcuts will work whichever version of Windows you are using.

Continue reading…

Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts
4 July 2007 in Help & Tips | Comments (1)

There are many keyboard shortcuts available in Windows Vista. A keyboard shortcut is a combination of keys you can press to perform a certain action within the operating system or a running program.

Many users (especially trained typists) find keyboard shortcuts easier than using the mouse because they are used to not having to move their hands very far on the keyboard. For the same reason, geeks are also very familiar with keyboard shortcuts!

Below is a list of the many keyboard shortcuts available in Windows Vista. I’ll cover shortcuts in Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail and Internet Explorer 7 in seperate posts – they have as nearly as many each! Continue reading…

RSS feed problems
4 July 2007 in AIV News | Comments (0)

An apology to my RSS subscribers… the move to a new server broke my RSS feed, which resulted in FeedBurner giving up on my feed entirely last night.

I hadn’t realised the AiV feed address had changed (although I probably should have!), and that I therefore needed to change my FeedBurner settings. Ooops.

The good news is that it’s all fixed now, and FeedBurner is burning the feed as before. Hoorah! If you want to keep up-to-date with hints, tips and news about Windows Vista, subscribe to the RSS feed.

AdventuresInVista has moved!
2 July 2007 in AIV News | Comments (0)

Some of my more regular readers may have noticed the downtime today.

Well, there’s a good reason! I recently signed up for a DreamHost server - the idea being to use this for my various blogs and php-based sites. Today, I started moving the blogs from M6 to the new server, and AdventuresInVista was my guinea-pig!

It’s gone quite well actually, and with the site now being hosted on a Linux server, all the post links are more readable (..invista.com/year/month/day/post-name/) - so it’ll be much easier to link to stuff.

Hopefully the site will be down far less now, and I’ve certainly noticed some speed improvements - lets hope you guys do too!

Compressed (Zipped) Folders So Sloooooooow
4 June 2007 in General | Comments (0)

I’ve just downloaded Wordpress 2.2 and am sat here waiting for Vista to uncompress the Zip download onto my server. I feel compelled to shout at the PC, which doesn’t happen very often!

It’s taken the best part of 20 minutes so far, and it’s still saying there’s 5 minutes remaining. I mean, c’mon… it’s only extracting 2.75 megabytes! Seriously, what’s taking so long………?!!?

I’m determined to get to the bottom of this, so watch this space!