Windows Vista

The MakeUseOf blog has recently put up a nice article listing the essential downloads for Windows Vista. These are the things which they think everyone should go and download after purchasing a new Vista computer or upgrading to Vista for the first time. It’s a great list and it includes many of…

Peter Provost posted a handy tip on his blog the other day that will be useful for anyone with a Vista computer that has a dual-core CPU. In Windows Vista, there’s a setting that lets you configure your PC to use both cores upon booting up (by default, it only uses one). You can change this setting…

Have you always wanted to build your own theme for Vista? You can with a new application called Vista Style Builder and the How-To-Geek has a great walkthrough to get you started with doing so. The Vista Style Builder application lets you modify the visual style of your Vista theme or even import…

A lot of people these days are becoming more aware of the energy savings to be had by shutting down unused equipment when it’s not in use. And while it’s no problem to shut off the TV and the end of the evening a lot of people have trouble doing the same for the PC. This is mainly because it’s nice…

It seems that lately I’ve just been finding more and more Windows Media Center plugins. The latest one I stumbled across (Thanks Ian!) is a way to get Facebook on Media Center. This is thanks to a soon-to-be-released application called Photato, which will be available in beta later this month. It…

There’s a new plugin for Windows Home Server users called TV Manager which copies your recordings from a Vista Media Center PC over to your Windows Home Server for storage and management. The plugin, still in beta, actually has 2 parts to it – one part for the WHS and one for Media Center. After the…

This weekend, I decided to look for an alternative to Windows Explorer. Although Windows Explorer gets the job done, there’s just a lot that it doesn’t do that I wish it would, and frankly, I miss XP’s version. Well, now, I have it back and then some! That’s one of the great things about…

I was recently stumbled across a link to this XP Zune theme when searching for ways to jazz up my older laptop. I had forgotten, but I used to really love this theme! The theme was sort of a take off on the also awesome “lost” XP theme - Royale Noir, but with a few tweaks. It’s sort of funny to look…

Sweet! Brandon just posted about the coolest little gadget I’ve seen in a while –the Mars weather gadget for Vista. Thanks to the Phoenix Mars Lander, this gadget displays the maximum and minimum daily temps on Mars as well as the Mars weather. Hint: It’s sunny a lot there. And for even more Mars…

Only a few months ago, Microsoft released the Technical Preview of Windows Search 4.0, a new standalone search tool for Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003. Now, the final version of Windows Search has arrived. It this version, there have been several improvements, including support for indexing…