Introduction

This Tricks Series is based off of the book "Tricks of the Microsoft Windows Vista Masters" by J. Peter Bruzzese.  The book, and subsequently the clips you have here, is a compilation of different blog experts, technical writers and over 40 different developers at Microsoft.

Shortcut Keys

Shortcuts help us to move faster and be more productive.  We all love finding a quicker way to do something.  The key to shortcuts is the Windows Key (literally). 

The Windows Key combined with numbers and letters can save you time.  For example, the Windows Key and the letter D will show you the desktop.

Using the Windows Key with numbers will help to open applications in your Quick Launch toolbar.

Five Fun Basic Tips

The five tricks you will learn in this lesson include the following:

• How to change your boot graphic to go from the GUI boot to the Aurora boot.
• Get your Run option back in the Start Menu.
• Tweak the Clock (Additional Clocks)
• Shift-Delete or Shift-Properties and how you obtain more options with these
• Turn on the Preview Pane for easy listening and viewing

CMD for Admins

There are two different Command Prompts in Windows Vista.  The Standard and the Administrative.  This lesson shows you how to access the Admin prompt by either right-clicking the Command Prompt application and choosing 'Run as Administrator' or putting cmd in the Instant Search and hitting Ctrl+Shift+Enter.

You can easily see if you are working with an Admin cmd prompt by looking at the top of the window.  It will say Administrator if it is the admin version.

Task Manager, Perfmon and Snipping

This lesson will help you work with the Task Manager, the Performance Monitor (to create a quick report of your system performance) and the new Snipping Tool.

To quickly access the Task Manager you just hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc

To run a quick performance report you just open an Administrative command prompt and type: perfmon /report

The Snipping Tool will help you get screencaptures of items in a rectangular or free form style.

Event Viewer and Activation Tricks

The event viewer has changed dramatically in Windows Vista.  This lesson will walk you through the changes and show you how to establish the performance of a task based off of an event.

In addition, this lesson explains that you can use Vista for a period of time without activating it. 

You can see how long you have by typing from a command prompt with your directory set as System32: cscript slmgr.vbs -xpr

You can reset the activation by typing: cscript slmgr.vbs -rearm

The System Configuration Utility

The System Configuration utility (msconfig) provides you a variety of tabs that can help you to make some quick configuration changes all from one interface:  The tabs you have include the following:

• General
• Boot
• Services
• Startup
• Tools

Quick Control Panel Applet Access

You can open up Control Panel applets without actually going to the Control Panel if you know the shortcuts.  This lesson will show you how to use the control.exe command from the Start menu with either the .cpl file or the canonical name.

In addition, you will be shown what happens if you type: control userpasswords2

Enable the Admin Account

When you install the OS you are asked to create a user account.  That account is given administrative rights but the Administrative account is created and disabled during the install as well.  This lesson will show you how to enable the account through the Local Users and Groups tool from the Computer console.

Windows Defender and Software Explorer

Windows Defender is typically used for scanning your system for spyware.  However, Software Explorer is another feature within Windows Defender that is often ignored or never known about.

Software Explorer shows you the programs that you have set to start up on Vista or those that are currently running.  You can view network-connected programs and Winsock service providers as well.

Multiple Local Group Policy Objects

In previous Windows versions that employ a Local Group Policy, there is only one policy you can create and this can be somewhat frustrating to an administrator.  Well, in Windows Vista you have the ability to create multiple Local Group Policy Objects (MLGPOs) and this lesson will how you how to do that.

You can establish the policies on a per user basis if you like, or simply configure policies that affect Administrators and Non-Administrators.

Cacls, iCacls and Chml

Located in the Application Compatibility Toolkit is a little known tool called the Standard User Analyzer.  It's a great tool for taking software or hardware that is only going to work with Vista under the administrative rights and altering the ACLs to loosen up so that the tool can be run by a Standard User.  This lesson will show you how that is done.

The Standard User Analyzer

Located in the Application Compatibility Toolkit is a little known tool called the Standard User Analyzer.  It's a great tool for taking software or hardware that is only going to work with Vista under the administrative rights and altering the ACLs to loosen up so that the tool can be run by a Standard User.  This lesson will show you how that is done.

CompletePC and VHD

When you perform a CompletePC backup of Vista the file that is created is strangely a .vhd file.  This is the same file type used by Virtual PC for your virtual OSs.  Now, this doesn't mean you can boot from a CompletePC backup but you can access the data by either mounting the vhd file you create with the backup through Virtual PC.  Or you can use another tool called vhdmount (a command line too) to mount a drive letter to the vhd file you have from your backup.  It makes for a quick and easy way to retrieve items from the backup.

The Windows Experience Index

The Windows Experience Index is a rating that is a number based upon five different components in your system that are tested and rated.  Each is given a Subscore and then your Base Score is actually the lowest number of your Subscore (not an average of the 5 scores together).

The five components are the following:

• Processor
• Memory (RAM)
• Graphics
• Gaming graphics
• Primary hard disk

Technically, the highest score you can get is a 5.9.  However, in this lesson we will show you how to tweak the underlying xml file so that you can give yourself a higher score (up to 9.9).

Conclusion

We certainly hope you found these informative.  Please contact us if you have any questions or comments.  And we will see you ... in the next lesson!