Fix Windows Vista Errors

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!

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.

In some instances, Vista installs may not have a properly working offline files folder. In this case, you may need to re-initialize the cache.

So if you find that the activate offline files is not available in control panel then you may want to apply this fix.

To fix the missing offline files in Vista you need to create the following DWORD in the registry and give it a value of 1.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CSC\Parameters\FormatDatabase

Note: Any edits to the reigstry are at your own risk and you should always take caution when editing the registry. You may also lose any unsynchronized changes when re-initializing the cache.

It is common to experience some problems with the Windows Vista power options, so here are some common problems and remedies.

No Standby Option

Windows Vista has removed the standby option. So don’t worry about this.

No Hibernate Option

Windows Vista has a new hybrid sleep mode. If this is turned on, you may not see the hibernate option in the shut down menu. To change the hybrid sleep mode, you will need to access the advanced power settings.

Control Panel -> Systems and Maintenance -> Power Options.

When using the hibernate option, Windows Vista writes the data to a file called hiberfil.sys. It might be possible that you have run out of disk space and Vista can no longer write to this file. Check this if you believe the hibernate option should be available.

If you have Disk Cleanup running, it may have cleaned the hibernate file. If this is the case untick the “Hibernation File Cleaner” option.

Cannot Wake From Hibernation

If you cannot wake the computer from hibernation then you should make sure you have installed all of the latest Windows Vista service packs and hot fixes. This has been an issue in the past and Vista has released fixes.

Some common error codes that you might experience:

STOP 0×1000007E
STOP 0×0000009F
STOP 0×00000044

The other problem you might experience is waking too early from hibernation. This can be difficult to debug, so make sure you check out any external and USB devices attached to the computer, as they are most likely the cause. Also check any software that might be running or set on a schedule that may interfere with hibernation.

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Free Download - Fix WIndows Vista Errors

Your monitor flicker or the refresh rate of your PC can contribute to problems such as eyestrain or headaches with the user.

Basically, humans can see light flickering up to 25 hertz. Anything above that level humans can not see but it can affect people, that is why you can get major eyestrain looking at a flickering light (above 100 hertz).

You should control your flickering in your PC to reduce any chance of the mentioned problems. You should control the flickering on your computers screen by reducing the refresh rate to at least 75 hertz.

To do this in Vista just follow this;

• Open control panel
• Click appearance and personalization
• Click personalization
• Click display settings
• Click advanced settings
• Click the monitor tab
• Select a new refresh rate
• Click apply and OK