Enabling the Administrator account in Vista Home
I just received a batch of five Dell laptops with Vista Home for a lab. One of the requirements was to have low privilege “Student” logins and the usual Administrator account for the instructors.
If you’ve dug around in Vista for any amount of time, you probably know by now the Administrator account is disabled by [...]
Windows Server 2008 and UAC
I know a lot of people are really annoyed by UAC or User Access Control in Windows Vista. You know, it’s the the flash of the screen and a prompt for you to say it’s okay to install a program or modify your system.
I actually don’t mind it on my Vista system, since I only get [...]
Emergency Patch Today!
A critical flaw in Internet Explorer (some say Exploder) has been found and patched today.
This is a very critical update due to the fact your system can be affected by just visiting a website.
Go to Windows Update and patch your system!
X-Mouse on Vista
Anyone used to using a UNIX-based OS like FreeBSD or Linux is familiar with X-Mouse.
In short, it changes the foreground focus (window, application or desktop) based on wherever the mouse cursor happens to be. This for many, speeds up productivity a bit by saving clicks (about a nano-second each).
To enable this in Vista, go to [...]
Vista SP2
There seems to be quite a laundry list of items coming in Vista SP2. This service pack actually covers Windows 2008 as well, in case you missed that news a while back. The advent of Vista SP1 coincided with the release of Windows 2008 in order to once again unify the kernel, ala NT4/W2K.
What’s in the [...]
Windows 7
Some people think it’s too soon for Windows 7, if that’s what they’re really going to call it. But having been released to manufacturing in November of 2006, it’ll be almost three years by the time Windows 7 is relased (and that’s if it’s on time).
Looking at Apple’s OS X delivery model, not to mention [...]
Critical Windows Patch
This doesn’t happen often for Microsoft, a patch outside the usual second Tuesday routine. Apparently a Critical patch for the server service that affects earlier versions of Windows (2000/XP/Server 2003 (they don’t mention the expired NT4)) and an Important fix for the latest versions (Vista/ Server 2008) was needed for this vulnerability that they just couldn’t [...]
Microsoft IFilter Pack
Thanks to Paul Thurrott for posting this about the MS IFilter pack made available last week.
These Office 2007 search filters can be added to SharePoint, Exchange and SQL so that the new Office files based on XML can be indexed by the search service.
These filters are already apart of Windows Desktop Search 4.0 in Vista, XP [...]
Vista Boot Manager
Boot.ini is dead (mostly) and the new sheriff in town is BCDEdit. I have a dual-boot system, XP and Vista, on two physical drives. It’s now been over six months since I booted into XP, so that small 160GB drive needs to be replaced with a larger 400GB drive.
When boot.ini was king, no problem, now with the new [...]
3 Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts
Here are three keyboard shortcuts I learned about while reading the Mastering Windows Vista book.
Windows key + Spacebar to bring the Windows Sidebar to the foreground (the Sidebar must be running)
Windows key + X for to launch the Mobility Center (only for laptops and tablet PCs)
Ctrl + Alt + End to bring up the security menu [...]