Fix Windows Vista Errors

Registry tweaks are a very easy and simple way you can change settings etc in your Windows Vista computer, you can even perform some task not available in your control panel. If you need to know how to access your registry to edit just go here;

• Open start and type run
• In the run box type Regedit
• Your Regedit box will open, it is here that you can edit your registry

Before you do any edits to your registry you should make a backup so if you do make a major mistake you can just restore this good version of your registry. To make a backup of your registry to this;

• Click the Start button and type systempropertiesprotection in the Start Search box
• Wait for Windows to search for available disks and most recent restore points
• In the System Properties dialog box on the System Protection tab click Create
• After the restore point has been created successfully click OK two times

Now here is a link to a list of a bunch of common registry edits for Windows Vista, we will be adding more to this list in the future so make sure you bookmark it.

Windows Vista Registry Edits

Yes, Windows Vista still has the command prompt and it is a useful tool. Many functions done via the command prompt are much much faster. The command prompt also has many cool utilities that can’t be found anywhere else.

In the following article we have compiled a very comprehensive list of all the Windows Vista command line functions. This list isn’t fully complete but it does cover the majority and includes everything you will probably ever need.

Windows Vista Command Line Reference

Feel free to send through any other important commands that we might have missed.

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Free download - Fix Vista errors and speed up your computer

Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) is a feature on Windows Vista that is targeted at improving the user experience of connecting and disconnecting external displays. TMM automatically finds external displays at boot, it can also remember settings of the same external display if you connect it later.

TMM is great if you often want to connect your PC to any external display etc, but if you never use one you can speed up your boot by a few seconds by disabling your TMM. To disable your TMM just;

• Open control panel
• Open system and maintenance
• Open Administrative tools
• Click task scheduler
• Expand task scheduler library (left column)
• Expand Microsoft and windows
• Click on MobilePC
• In the middle column click on TMM
• Right click and click disable
• Done

Or alternatively you can disable your TMM in your Regeditor;

• Open regeditor
• Go to this location
  • Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TMM
• Click UseIViewHelper
• Set the value data to 0
• Click OK

Because this is such a hot topic, we have devoted alot of our resources to showing you how to speed up Windows Vista. So far with the tweaks on our blog and website, you can get considerable improvements in Vista performance, in some cases up to 300% improvement.

So what we have done is put together all the best Vista speed tweaks into one article. As we get more speed tweaks, we will continue to add them in.

If you have any doubts about your Vista performance, then get started with these tweaks and you will find some definite improvements.  You will also find this extremely useful if you have hardware constraints and can not physically upgrade your system RAM, etc.

Speed Up Windows Vista Guide

Automatic startup programs in Windows Vista can be annoying and they can hog alot of resources. There is no point in starting up a bunch of programs if you are not going to use them anyway.

So this little Vista tweak will help increase your startup time and will optimize your sytem. You will also have less processes running after startup, so you should get some better overall performance.

Disable Unwanted Startup Programs in Vista

• Click start
• Type “msconfig” into the search box
• Click on the “startup” tab
• Uncheck the services you don’t want to startup. Just be careful here, don’t uncheck vital services or things you are not sure of.
• click “OK”
• You can always add the services back in by following the same process.

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Free Download - Fix Vista Startup Problems

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”.

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!!

OK so if you are using Windows Vista, you have probably noticed by now that “My Documents” from the old XP days is now called “Documents”. I love it when everything changes for no other reason than to be confusing.

Anyway, if you want to edit the location of where “Documents” points, you can do so by right-clicking and selecting properties.

However, you may want to do this via the registry, it can come in handy for certain situations. So here is the Registry Key you will want to edit for changing the default location of the “Documents” folder in Vista.

Open the registry editor in Vista, just type in “regedit” in the run box.

Browse to Registry Key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal

You can then alter that value to point to a different folder/location.

Have Fun!
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Fix Vista Errors and Improve Performance - Free Scan

It is a good idea to know the state of health of your hard disks. If you have alot of important data, you wouldn’t want your drive to fail unexpectedly (even though you do have backups right?).

You can use a variety of automated tools to check things like disk errors, but in Windows Vista it is pretty easy to do a quick manual check of your drive(s).

• Select Start -> “Computer”
• Right click on the drive you wish to check
• Select “Properties”
• Click on the “Tools” tab
• Click the “Check Now” button
• Check both of the options: Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attemtp recovery of bad sectors
• Click “Start”

You may not be able to check a disk that is in use. That is no problem, you will be given the option to schedule a disk check. This can be done on next bootup etc.

Scanning can take a bit of time, depending on disk size and the amount of data on there. So be patient!