Browse by Tags

All Tags » Windows Vista » Miscellany - not security (RSS)
Thursday, January 17, 2008 9:24 PM

Waiting for Vista SP1?

In a previous article, I wrote about how to sound stupid by saying " let's wait for Service Pack 1 before we deploy Windows Vista ". Now here are a few ways to sound clever, by pointing to specific issues that will be fixed by Windows Vista...
Posted by Alun Jones | 5 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Monday, September 03, 2007 8:51 PM

Why complain about UAC prompts?

Jesper's article in TechNet Magazine on the purpose and future of UAC in Windows Vista and beyond reminded me that there's a whole slew of behaviours more annoying than UAC's prompting (which, as Jesper points out, is only the most visible...
Posted by Alun Jones | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: , , , ,
Thursday, August 30, 2007 6:08 AM

Let's just wait for Service Pack 1

Every so often, I'll hear it said, and frequently not in jest, "let's wait until Service Pack 1 before we deploy Vista", or sometimes "Server 2008". While it's true that Microsoft has indeed announced plans to test, and...
Posted by Alun Jones | 10 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Sunday, July 08, 2007 2:02 PM

diskpart 'shrink' needs a little work...

I'm playing with BitLocker a little, and I need a small temporary partition to encrypt and decrypt on a frequent basis. No problem, right? I can just open up Computer Management, select Storage, Disk Management, and then shrink a volume that has lots...
Posted by Alun Jones | 6 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Friday, June 15, 2007 9:46 PM

Context menus not working in Vista?

I spent a while the other day trying to figure this one out. Under "Start", I have a 'pinned' Command Prompt item. I can't get a context menu (aka "right-click menu") to appear when I right-click on this Command Prompt...
Posted by Alun Jones | with no comments
Filed under: ,
Tuesday, June 05, 2007 4:04 AM

Interesting empty file behaviour in Windows Vista upgrades

Did you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista? Do you turn off Explorer's "Hide Known File Types" option? If so, try this: Right-click on your desktop, select "New" and then "Text File". Name your text file "test...
Posted by Alun Jones | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Sunday, May 06, 2007 8:29 PM

"Vista Ready Upgrade" does not mean ReadyBoost-compatible

I bought two SD Cards today, each of which are 2GB in size (and each with a warning on the back that this means 2*10^6, not 2*2^30, bytes). One of them is to go into my wife's pink camera, the other is to go into my laptop, as a ReadyBoost drive ...
Posted by Alun Jones | 5 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:50 PM

Alternate Data Streams in Windows Vista

Windows NT 3.1 was released ... oh, back in the early to mid '90s. Ever since then, I've been aware that it supported Alternate Data Streams, also known as ADS, or in some technical documents that didn't make it to final review, Alternative...
Posted by Alun Jones | 8 comment(s)
Filed under: , , , ,
Saturday, February 03, 2007 3:26 PM

Which is the most recent?

I've been trying to figure out why I can't use the "Save as PDF or XPS" function from Word 2007, in the Office 2007 suite in Windows Vista. I assumed it was Vista's fault, because my wife's machine, running Windows XP, works fine. First, the obvious rant...
Posted by Alun Jones | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Sunday, January 28, 2007 9:37 AM

Vanishing Point Game, Seattle [Event 4]

17:45 - A couple drives down unfamiliar streets, looking for a place that they only believe is the right venue, based on an ability to throw GPS co-ordinates at Google Maps. [Yes, Google Maps, because I couldn't figure out how to do that with Live Maps...
Posted by Alun Jones | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Tuesday, January 09, 2007 6:25 PM

GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Playing with Vista a little more this evening, and I clear some disk space to do some shrinking and expanding of partitions. The "Disk Cleanup" tool has a tempting 1.5GB that I can release by disabling Hibernate - which I've done, simply to free up a...
Posted by Alun Jones | 9 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Sunday, December 31, 2006 8:35 AM

As a newsreader, Windows Mail sucks worse than Outlook Express

First, let me explain briefly what a newsreader is - specifically, in this case, I mean a Usenet newsreader. Usenet is a community of systems that have chosen to exchange messages in 'newsgroups' organised and named as a hierarchy of topics - for instance...
Posted by Alun Jones | 6 comment(s)
Filed under: ,
Saturday, December 30, 2006 8:48 AM

ReadyBoost - swap space on a stick.

So, I've finally upgraded my laptop from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Vista. The upgrade process itself took over three hours - the first fifteen minutes of which was basically me uninstalling the applications that the Vista installation told me would interfere...
Posted by Alun Jones | 10 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,