Windows Vista

If you’re running Windows Vista Ultimate, then you know about Windows DreamScene, the feature in Vista which lets you set an animated background as your desktop wallpaper. I ran DreamScenes at first because they were something new to try, but after a while I returned to plain old wallpaper. The…

I had been using the latest and greatest search tool for my XP PC, Windows Search 4.0, but somehow I had missed this: the Filter Pack for searching in Office documents. With the the Microsoft Filter Pack installed, Windows Search 4.0 is able to search within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other…

Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich is joined by ZDNet blogger Ed Bott and other industry experts in the latest edition of the popular Springboard series of webcasts which discuss Vista in-depth. Typical Springboard topics include Vista adoption questions, resources, tools, and more. In this…

Are you a political junkie? Here in the U.S. it's hard not to be when it's election season. With so much going on - rallies, debates, and economic crises - it seems that the poll numbers change every day. Now you don't have to wait on the news to give you the latest info from the presidential polls…

Although changing an icon is something that’s built into the Windows OS, avid desktop customizers are always on the lookout for better ways to make changes on the fly. A new tool that helps you quickly update your drive icons is Drive Icon Changer. All it does is update icons, nothing else, but…

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Stephen Rose discusses why developers should look at using virtual environments for developing and the benefits of doing so. He addresses everything from the creation of a complete development environment's domain in a box to how to…

This Holiday season is certain to be merry considering all the great new products being offered to you from Microsoft Hardware, Vista powered machines and Games for Windows. Check out some of the sexy new Dell laptops,  BlueTrack mice and of course...some great games for Windows…

Gabriel Aul is a 16 year Microsoft veteran who has always had his hand in the chaotic world of system performance and reliability, from technical product support and testing to being a leader on the Windows performance team. In fact, he was part of the team that developed the original Watson…

Gary Schare and Bruce Burns sit down (well, sort of, Bruce stands, Gary leans) with us to talk about the sudden uptake of the latest Windows 64 bit client OS. It's very encouraging that Windows 64 is finding its way onto consumer client systems and into mainstream computing. This spike in…

Windows Vista contains a much improved telemetry system that collects fault data and sends detailed reports to Microsoft that are used in fixing problems that cause apps to hang/crash (of course, this data only reaches us if you choose to send it...). What have we learned so far? What does…