Fix Windows Vista Errors

You should all now know about the cool new Vista power options feature where you can use very low power to sleep your PC and wake up ready to go at a moments notice. But what we are hearing from many of our users is that quite often they will come back to their computer to find it on, burning electricity.

There are a few things that may be causing Vista to wake up out of a nap, hopefully these tweaks should let your Vista PC sleep well and not burn up energy.

A Device is Waking Your PC Up?

Your PC may be getting woken up by a device that is set to wake up your PC. To check what devices are waking up your computer and how to fix the problem just read the following;

• Open cmd (run as administrator)
• Type this at the command prompt;
  • powercfg –devicequery wake_armed
• This will show you a list of devices that will wake up your PC

You can disable a device from waking up your PC by doing this;

• Open device manager
• Find your suspect device
• Right click and press properties
• Click the power management tab
• Uncheck ‘allow this device to wake the computer’
• Click OK

Stop Your Network Card From Waking Up Your PC

Just like your devices your network card can also wake your Vista machine up, you can disable this feature by doing this;

• Go to device manager
• Expand network adapters
• Right click on your network card and click properties
• Make sure ‘allow this device to wake the computer’ is unchecked
• Click OK

Edit Multimedia Power Options

You may want to perform this tweak so your multimedia features won’t wake up your PC;

• Type power options in your start bar
• Click change plan settings on your power plan
• Click change advanced power settings
• Scroll down and expand multimedia settings
• Expand when sharing media
• Choose allow the computer to sleep (you can decide if you want this on battery, plugged in or both)
• Done

Microsoft has finally released the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 after releasing the beta version late last year.

The Vista SP2 update includes new support for recording Blu-ray discs straight from the Vista OS, updated support for Bluetooth v2.1, and bug fixes that address slow shutdowns and mysterious crashes.

Vista SP2 can now be downloaded from Microsoft’s Download Center. However, anyone who had been running the beta of the service pack, which was released late last year, will have to remove it before proceeding with the install.

“Over the weekend, some of you may have received an e-mail from us reminding you that the Windows 7 Beta expires on Aug. 1, 2009,” Brandon LeBlanc, a spokesperson for Microsoft, wrote on the official Windows blog.

The release features support for five languages: English, German, Spanish, French and Japanese.

I was playing around with some settings in Vista today trying to find anything ‘new’ to tell you guys about, I didn’t have too long so I didn’t find the ultimate tweak but I did find 2 useful shortcut tweaks.

They both involve the start menu;

Add Run Command to Your Start Menu

• Right click in your task bar
• Select properties
• Click the start menu tab
• Click customize
• Scroll down and check run command
• Click ok
• Your run command will now be in your start menu

Add a Regedit Shortcut to Your Start Menu

• If you are like me and love regedit then you will love this tweak
• Click on your start menu and type regedit
• On the regedit.exe program right click
• Select pin to start menu now reopen your start menu and you will see the shortcut

The Data Execution Prevention (DEP) feature on Windows Vista helps to prevent dangerous external threats from running themselves on your PC, this should help stop things like viruses and other threats.

Some people do not like DEP running on their system but personally I would just leave it enabled. If you do want to disable it or just want to let DEP run just on the programs you want then just follow these tweaks.

Disable Data Execution Prevention

• Click start
• Type CMD in the start bar
• Type in the following command
  • bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff
• You will now need to reboot
• To turn DEP back on type the following command in CMD
• bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOn

Edit Data Execution Prevention

• Open control panel
• Click system and maintenance
• Click system
• Click advanced system settings
• Click the advanced tab
• Under performance click settings
• Click the Data Execution Prevention tab
• Turn on Turn on DEP for all programs and services except for those I select
• Now click add and select the applications you want DEP turned off on
• Click apply and OK
• You will need to reboot to see the effects

If you have ever tried to download large amounts of data on a USB stick you will have noticed just how long it takes, well this is a tweak that will improve the speeds that you can download things onto your USB drive.

Warning: If you take your USB stick out of your PC a lot you may lose data if you perform this tweak.

• Click start
• Right click on computer and select manage
• Select device manager
• Expand disk drives and select your USB drive
• Right click and select properties
• Select the policies tab
• Select optimize for performance
• Select OK
• Done

Here are a couple of tweaks you can perform that should increase the speed of your hard drive, just take note of some of the warnings before you perform these tweaks.

Low Disk Space Warning

• You need to disable your Low Disk Space Warning
• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer
• Select a new DWORD and call it NoLowDiskSpaceChecks
• Set the value to 1
• Done

Enable Advanced Performance

• Open your control panel
• Click system and maintenance
• Click device manager
• Expand disk drives
• Double click on your drive
• Select the policies tab
• Check enable advanced performance
• Click OK, done

Do you run multiple screens from your one PC and get rather annoyed all day at looking at multiple versions of the one wallpaper, then you can set the wallpaper so it stretches over both displays.

Before you set the wallpaper over both displays you have to make your image large enough and of the right resolution so that basically it doesn’t look funny.

So if you want to stretch an image over more than one screen then do this;

• Right click on your desktop
• Select personalize
• Click desktop background
• Select the image you want
• Underneath you will see the option for how should the picture be positioned
  • Select tile (the middle one)
• Select OK, done

I have written a few posts before about editing your task bar so I was suprized when I found out I had not said anything about resizing it.

This is a quick tweak you can perform that will make your task bar larger, enabling you to access more shortcuts etc from your task bar.

• Right click in your task bar
• Uncheck lock the task bar
• Use your mouse and at the top of the task bar drag the bar up to your desired height
• Now lock the task bar again
• Done

All of Windows Vista’s drives use the newer NTFS partition system rather than the old FAT32 system, but what you might not know is that Vista still supports the ancient (DOS, early windows) 8.3 file-name convention.

If you still run old DOS programs then you need to keep this feature active, but if you don’t you should disable this feature and speed up your file access.

To disable your 8.3 file-name convention just follow this;

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
• Find this key
  • NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
• Change the value from 0 to 1
• OK

If you are running a public machine or many people use your PC you may want to stop anyone from accessing the control panel where they could change settings etc.

I know of people who have had trouble in the past with ‘idiots’ changing all sorts of settings on the computers at places like libraries and were rather happy when I gave them this tweak.

To restrict control panel access just do this registry edit (remember to backup first);

• Open regedit
• Navigate to these locations
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Policies\Explorer
• Create a new DWORD value
  • NoControlPanel
• Set the value to 0
• Close regedit
• Reboot
• You should find the control panel can no longer be accessed