This one is mostly for myself (a reminder to do this on all my PCs):

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/assign-a-shortcut-key-to-the-snipping-tool-in-windows-vista/

Have you ever right-clicked on a file from a mapped share and gotten this really irritating popup message from Windows? Even more annoying, when you try and drag and drop files from a network share, you get another popup asking "Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?"

The HowToGeek website has an excellent blog post about how to get rid of this! - Check it out...

I had a very strange problem the other day. I tried to connect to a share on a Windows embedded device (a Lacie NAS), however no matter what I tried my Vista (64bit) would not connect, but my laptop running Windows XP had no problem.

I found out that if you cannot authenticate when accessing a shared folder from a Windows Vista-based computer on a computer running a version of Windows prior to
Windows XP (such as Windows 98 or Windows 95), a computer running an operating system other than Microsoft Windows, or to a network device, the cause might be a mismatch in the configured support for NTLM 2, an authentication protocol that is used for file and printer sharing connections. By default, Windows Vista is configured to use NTLM2.

To solve the problem I had to change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel registry value on the computer running Windows Vista to 1.

Did you know that Windows Vista has a free screen capture tool? Its called the Snipping Tool.

Well .. if you're tired of pressing Alt+PrintScrn, take a look at this!

 

Vista does not mount ISO files by default, which is kind of strange when Microsoft delivers e.g. Orcas Beta2 as an IMG file.

However, a utility called Virtual Clone Drive takes care of this. The utility will let you mount .ISO, .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF and .BIN files.

Please note that this utility does not work on Windows Vista 64 bit edition.

It's possible to get your Windows Vista license on an altenative media, and even convert your 32-bit OEM version to a 64-bit! - Check out this site for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/1030/ordermedia/da-dk/default.mspx

 

One of the best (and probably most overlooked features of Vista) is the "Preview Pane" (in Explorer Menu: Organize > Layout > Preview Pane), which makes it really easy to see the content of files without having to open the actual Application (as a sidenode, I saw a video yesterday about the new Leopard OS which contains two "new" and "innovative" features called "Cover Flow" and "Quick Look", which is - yup, you guessed it - Preview of files directly in Explor... sorry Finder :-) .. so much for Apple comming up with new ideas!)

Anyway... if you're running Office 2007, you're able to preview Word, Excel etc. file formats (don't know if this also works if you're using Office 2003). Sadly a format which is not supported native by Vista is PDF.

Luckily Tim Heuer and Foxit (by far the fastest PDF reader for windows, check it out!) have joined forces and put together a PDF preview handler which can be downloaded right here: FoxitPdfPreviewHandlerSetup.msi (1,68 mb)

If you're into creating your own Preview Handler, take a look at the this article from MSDN Magazine.

Windows Vista introduces small improvements in many aspects of the GUI - One I would like to point out is the ability (at last!) to use the arrow keys to navigate in the Windows Alt-Tab task list .. very nice, when you have a lot of applications running.

They've also changed the dialog so I don't need to scroll when I'm running more than 28 applications as the above image shows - finally!!

Phew .. been a while since I've had time to do some Bloggin' - been busy at work with the new Sonofon website, planning my upcomming holiday to Siggraph (the largest 3D event in the world) and poking on a 'heavy-duty' ASP.NET AJAX Web Application :-) .. Anyway, time to start writing a bit again!

I've just downloaded the beta 3 of Windows 2008 server (aka "Longhorn") and are planning to install it on my old ShuttleX - The download is in the form of a 1.8GB ISO file, however Windows Vista does not native support burning ISO files .. after a bit of Googling I stumbled upon this great little utility from the Vista PowerToys group called ISOrecorder .. approx. 300KB download and then burning ISO files is a matter of right clicking the file in Explorer - Enjoy!!

There seems to be a problem with updating Windows Defender when using Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update in Windows Vista. The problem becomes apparent when Windows Defender puts up a warning in the system tray that its signatures are not up to date.

The problem got my attention yesterday, when KimJ told me he could'nt update his Defender definition file, and I realised that I actually had the same problem - Did a bit of research and found an article which shows how to solve the problem.