I am still have problems with Vista. If I weren’t in the middle of a semester, I would dump it tomorrow, but it will have to wait until Christmas.I started making a list of things in Vista that I like, but aren’t available in XP. The list is short.

1 - Search-able Start Button - I use this at least fifty times a day.

2 - The user directory structure - I like the fact that all the “My This”, “My That” folders are gone. Now it’s all in a directory called “Users” instead of the ridiculously named “Documents and Settings”.

Beyond this, I can’t think of anything else that benefits me. Am I missing something?

Most of the vista users complain about the confirmation prompts like “Windows need your permission to continue” or “Are you sure you want to do that”?. Such prompts are not just to annoy Vista users, they are in place to prevent any system process from performing any malicious activity, like preventing viruses.
Anyway, most users would like to turn off UAC, sacrificing security for ease of use.
This is the procedure to disable or turn off UAC in Vista.

Method 1 :Using control panel
1.Open Control Panel.
2.Under User Account and Family settings click on the “Add or remove user account”.
3.Click on one of the user accounts.
4.Under the user account click on the “Go to the main User Account page” link.
5.Under “Make changes to your user account” click on the “Change security settings” link.
6.In the “Turn on User Account Control (UAC) to make your computer more secure” click to unselect the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer”. Click on the Ok button.
7.You will be prompted to reboot your computer. Do so when ready.
(In order to re-enable UAC just select the above checkbox and reboot.)

Method 2: Using MSCONFIG
1.Launch MSCONFIG by from the Run menu.
2.Click on the Tools tab. Scroll down till you find “Disable UAP” (this should probably change to UAC in next Vista beta builds and in the RTM version). Click on that line.
3.Press the Launch button.
4.A CMD window will open. When the command is done, you can close the window.
5.Close MSCONFIG. You need to reboot the computer for changes to apply.
(You can re-enable UAC by selecting the “Enable UAP” line and then clicking on the Launch button.)

Labels: uac, uap, vista

After using your PC for a while you may notice that it seems to take longer and longer to start up. This can be extremely annoying, especially if all you want to do is turn on your PC for a quick peek at your bank account or quickly gather some information from a letter or email. So, something that may take a minute to do, will now take 10 minutes because your PC has to load up all of those programs at startup. Having a quick-start option just for these reasons would be fantastic. Come on Microsoft!!! As of now, I will show you how to minimize those start-up times to get them closer to being acceptable.

1. For XP: Click Start -> Click Run -> Type msconfig -> Press Enter

For Vista: Click Windows button ->In the search area, Type msconfig -> Press Enter

2. You will notice the System Configuration Utility pop-up.

3. Click on the Startup tab

4. This lists every program that starts up with Windows

5. Very carefully sort through the list. Some of it may not make sense. For example in XP: Apple’s Quicktime program is actually called “qttask“. To disable this program from starting up, uncheck the box beside “qttask” -> Click Apply -> Restart the computer. To see a better description of each file, expand the width of the “Command” column, up near the Startup tab. I recommend only unchecking one item at a time, to make sure that nothing goes wrong during the next restart. Please be extra careful with this, as some of these files are necessary for either Windows to work correctly or maybe even your corporate software.

If you have any questions, or are hesitant on doing this, please email me and I will gladly help you through the process.

If you’re one of those people, and I believe they are still around, who still likes the Windows XP Luna interface (that’s the lollypop blue one), then this is a download for you.

Rather then transforming XP into that fancy Aero interface, or something too Mac-like or even Ubuntu earthiness, XPrize simply turns XP into… XP.

Not quite, but it updates the Luna interface to a more modern look complete with glassy effects and cuts back on some of that bevelly goodness. It still looks like XP, but more in line with 2008 rather then 2001.

XPrize also does a good job of updating all those hundreds of interface quirks which are left over from Windows 95. You know, all those icons buried in the control panel and explorer. In fact the website says it patches 150 system files and updates hundreds of resources.

It’s very similar to the official Windows Royale theme, but with the addition of a new boot screen, animations, icons, logon screen, images, screensavers and more.

On September 25th, 2007, David Gainer of the Microsoft Excel group did a post acknowledging a Microsoft Excel 2007 math bug involving calculations of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536.

An example bug is: 77.1 * 850 for which Excel returned 100,000 instead of 65,535.

According to David, the issue was due to change in the Excel calculation logic in Office 2007. The bug affects Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007.

The patch has been posted here.