Window vista tips

We've got 15 tips and tricks for enhancing your Vista experience.

9. Windows Vista games deposit their saves into a special directory, called Saved Games, in your personal folder. In theory, that will make upgrading to a new system much easier for gamers, who like to migrate their game saves.

10. When using the Help system, it's usually advantageous to include Microsoft's online database in your search. The online/offline status of your search is located on the bottom right of the Help window. You can click it to toggle.

 

11. The Games folder is a powerful repository of all things gaming. From within, you launch games, update games with the latest patches, enable parental controls to protect younger users from harmful content, and more. Invoke it by clicking Start/Games.

 

12. Several applications are available to help you tweak Windows Vista for maximum performance. They in-clude TweakVI (www.totalidea.com), TweakVista (www.tweakvista.com/tweakvistautility), and VistaBootPRO (www.vistabootpro.org). And don't forget about Windows ReadyBoost, which lets you use a removable flash memory drive to boost system memory.

 

13. Do you use the icon in the upper left corner of system and application windows? A quick double-click closes the window (instead of a single click on the X at the upper right). Though Microsoft left the icon out in Vista, the function remains.

 

14. In Microsoft Windows Explorer, you can use column headers (Name, Size, and so on) to sort files. Savvy users may right-click on a column head to remove items or add some—say, Dimensions for images. There are around 45 such columns available in Windows XP. Windows Vista has well over 250, covering a multitude of metadata.

 

15. If you've become used to surfing your Program Menu to get to applications, you'll be in for a shock when you first use Microsoft Windows Vista. The new Program Menu shows you only recently used applications and requires extra clicks to navigate to submenus. This can be very frustrating but, thankfully, the Search box Microsoft has added to the Start menu is a great replacement—as long as you're an accurate typist. As quickly as you can type, it returns intelligent results in apps, files, even e-mail messages.

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