Fix Windows Vista Errors

The Aero theme that ships with Windows Vista is a pretty nice theme, but we often get people asking about the borders and how to shrink them etc.

Well the good news is that with the Vista Aero theme you can do a lot of customization to the borders. You can increase or decrease the size/padding of the borders, you can also change the levels of transparency of the borders and their colors. Lets look at how you can do this.

Changing border size/padding

• Right-click anywhere on the desktop and select “Personalize”
• Click on “Window Color and Appearance”
• Click the “Advanced” button. You will also need to ensure that the Aero theme is selected
• To alter border size, select “Border Padding” from the dropdown list and choose the size you prefer. Larger or smaller

Changing color/transparency

Some users hate the transparency effect, while others love it. Here is how you can change the transparency and colors on the borders.

• Right-click anywhere on the desktop and select “Personalize”
• Click on “Window Color and Appearance”
• Turn transparency on or off by checking the “Enable transparency” option
• You can choose how transparent by moving the “Color intensity” slider
• Lastly, you can choose the color scheme you want

Remember those commercials for Windows Vista with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld that were supposed to help rejuvenate the brand?

You have probably long forgotten, so here are the commercials in case you want to see them again:

http://fix-vista-errors.com/blog/2008/09/09/gatesseinfeld-shoe-commercial/
http://fix-vista-errors.com/blog/2008/09/16/second-seinfeld-commercial/

Well this was a 300 million dollar ad campaign and personally I think the money could have been better spent and so do most other people that were surveyed. In a recent survey which appears on Advertising Age here, the Seinfeld and Gates commercial was rated as the worst commercial (or best worst ad).  However, Apple was rated as no 1. I think its time for Microsoft to hire a new ad agency.

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Fix Vista Errors - Free Scan

The Vista Transformation Pack (VTP) is a program that transforms your Windows XP into Windows Vista.  It emulates most of the Vista appearance including taskbar, menus and even the cool sidebar widgets.

The VTP is a popular product and for good reason. It does an excellent job in mimicking Vista, but you can still retain the performance of Windows XP, which relies on less hardware and resources.  The latest release of VTP does have many new and improved features which we found quite impressive. Some of great new features in VTP 9:

• New “Vista Rainbar”
• Improvements to the transparency/glass effects
• Improved file explorer with glass toolbar + built in search
• Improved versions of ViStart and ViOrb
• and tons more

If you have never used a Vista Transformation Pack, then you are missing out. This is a cool program to either emulate Vista appearance or just for something different to play around with on XP. The latest version is Windows XP SP3 compatible and should install smoothly and easily on any XP system.

Download Vista Transformation Pack 9

Here is a cool little Windows Vista secret for opening your quick launch items.

Just press the “Windows key + x”, where x is the number identifying the quick launch icon.

So in the example below, to open up the Thunderbird application, the user would press the Windows key and the number 2 on their keyboard. To fire up Firefox, it would just be a matter of pressing the Windows key and 1.

You will obviously need quick launch items for this to work. You can easily add items to your quick launch bar, just by dragging them in there.

It has been officially announced today that the next Windows operating system will be called Windows 7. Mike Nash (VP of Windows Product Management) said on his blog;

“The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows.  We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or “aspirational” monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista.

And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense.  Likewise, coming up with an all-new “aspirational” name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.”

As we have blogged about previously Windows 7 will still be released some time in early 2010.

One of the nice new features in Windows Vista is the ability to store user names and passwords.

If you have to connect to different fileservers, websites or anything that requires authentication, you might get annoyed with having to type in the username and password all the time. Well Vista now allows you to add and store these credentials so that you don’t need to type them in every time.

To access this feature:

Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Select manage your network passwords (left column).

From here you will see all of your stored logons and you can then add/remove.

To add a new username/password, just click the “Add” button. You will then see the screen below. Here you can specify what you will log on to (eg: fileserver, network drive). Then just add your username and password and specify if it will be a Windows or non Windows logon.

This should save you some time and hassle but note - this feature does have some bugs. There were some problems connecting to Linux file servers such as Samba.

Previously we have discussed some of the financial and environmental benefits available with the new Vista power saving features.

Today we will discuss more about the power management features and how they work. By default the Windows Vista power managment features should be enabled, but it is worth knowing more about them, so you can implement your own power saving strategy.

The Windows Vista power features were created to reduce power consumption, but they also had the goal of making it very easy, fast and reliable to turn the computer “on” or “off”.

Previous versions of Windows had standby, hibernate and shut down. Vista has Sleep, Hybrid Sleep and Hibernation.  You can access the power management features in the following location:

Control Panel -> Systems and Maintenance -> Power Options

Power modes in Windows Vista:

Sleep: The computer enters a low power consumption mode, with programs and data in memory. Restarting from the sleep mode is very fast and should only take a couple of seconds.

Hybrid Sleep: The computer enters a low power consumption mode, with programs and data in memory but the computer also writes data to disk. So if there was a power outage, the computer can be recovered to the same state.  Restarting from hybrid sleep mode will be slower than in regular sleep mode.

Hibernate: Computer data is saved to a special file. If the computer is switched off or unplugged, all data is stored and state can be recovered.

Additionally, you can also set what happens when the power button is pressed, or when the lid is closed (for laptops). For example: you could set the computer into hibernate mode when the power button is pressed, instead of shutting down. The same also applies to closing the lid.

As mentioned earlier, the default settings in Vista are setup to conserve power, however, you can optimize these, based on whether you want to use sleep mode, hybrid sleep or hibernation.

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