Fix Windows Vista Errors

A huge issue with any parent nowadays is making sure their children are safe and secure on their computer, and not seeing or hearing any internet “nasties”. Parental controls are very important to most parents so I thought I’d discuss today some parental control features in Windows Vista.

The parental controls built into Windows Vista are designed to help parents manage what their children can do on the computer. It means any parent can control and view the amount of usage their child uses. The parental controls will let you;

• Restrict computer use to specific times
• Control games their children can play
• Control programs they can use
• Restrict websites they can visit

To get started on the parental controls you firstly have to make sure your account has administration privileges. Once you have done this you can now setup a new account for your child and to add parental controls to it.

Add a New Account

• Select control panel
• Click Add or Remove User Accounts
• Click Create a New Account
• Create a new account making sure that the standard user button is on

Now Setup Parental Controls

• Select control panel
• Click Set Up Parental Controls
• Select your child’s user account
• Click the On button

You have now setup parental controls for your child’s account, you have the following options to control exactly what your child see’s and does on their Vista computer.

Time Limits
You can control the amount of time your child spends on the PC each day

Games
You can control the type of games your child plays

Web Filter
1. Click on the Vista Web Filter option
2. Check that blocking is enabled
3. Edit the Allow or block list and enter the websites that are accessible to your child
4. Click the “Only allow Web sites which are on the allow list” check box

Programs
You can select what programs your child does and does not get access to. So if you are really against them using word you can select that Word is a no go program.

All you have to do is to control and monitor your childs computer habit. You can view the hours used by your child as well as what they have done so you can decide how they use their computer appropriately.

With this cool little hack, you can unlock the secret administrator account that is hidden in Windows Vista.

Windows Vista has a few built-in default accounts. These include the Guest account and the Administrator account. The Guest account you would have seen, and this can easily be activated. The Administrator account is a bit more tricky. By default this is not activated and it is also hidden. So lets look at how you can unlock and use this account.

You need to open the command prompt, type “cmd” from the search box. Then type the following into the command prompt window: “net user administrator /active:yes”. Now the default administrator account will show up when you log in. This account has supreme power in Windows Vista and you wont need to worry about UAC annoyances.

Note: if you wish to turn this off, just run “cmd” again and this time enter: “net user administrator /active:no”.

Have you performed a search in the box in the start panel and found it to be rather slow, well so have many others. This is due to a feature in Vista that whenever you perform that search it actually searches through your entire file index, and that is huge!

The best way to speed up this search is to set it that whenever it searches it does not search through the files on your hard drive, to do this just;

• Right click on the start button
• Click properties
• Click on customize
• Uncheck search communications
• Set Search Files to Don’t Search for files
• OK

Do you ever get the urge to have you home directory icon accessible from your desktop? Your home directory is the folder that contains these items for each account on your computer;

• AppData
• Contacts
• Desktop
• Documents
• eng
• Favorites
• Links
• Music
• Pictures
• Saved Games
• Searches
• Videos

You can easily set it up so that you will get an icon on your desktop linking you to your home directory, to do this just;

• Click start
• Right click on your user name
• Select show on desktop
• Done

If you want to improve performance of your SATA hard drive, here is a quick little tweak in Vista that should give some improvements over the default settings.

Speed up SATA performance in Vista:

• Open the device manager: click start -> right click computer -> click properties -> click device manager in left column
• Goto the disk drive section
• Right click your hard disk
• Click the policies tab
• Check the box “Enable advanced performance”

Your SATA drive(s) should now run faster!!