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I love the concept of UAC. I’m sure it’ll make the OS more secure for people like my mom. For power users, you’ll soon want to just shut the damned thing off. I know it has good intentions but it just gets in the way sometimes. I was always under the impression that UAC was either on or off, and that if you turned it off you lost some of the security built into IE7. Turns out the folks over at TweakVista have written up an article on how to disable UAC, but only for the administrator accounts. That’s pretty slick, now it won’t get in my way, but it will prompt my wife/kid/mother/etc and help keep them safe.

Follow these steps to disable UAC only for administrators:

1. Click on the Start button and type in secpol.msc and hit Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies and then Security Options.
3. Scroll to the bottom and locate “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”.
4. Right click on this setting and select Properties.
5. Set the value to Elevate without prompting.
6. Reboot.

As soon as you do this, the security center will start barking at you that UAC is disabled. I guess they intend to annoy you one way or another. You can of course disable the security center alerts as well. Click on the alert in the system tray, then click Change the way Security Center alerts me and select ”I do not want notification messages from Security Center”.

Holy crap, this is a hidden gem. With the massive size of hard drives nowadays you’re bound to lose some stuff and end up relying on Windows search to find it. But what if you run a certain search often, wouldn’t it be handy if you could SAVE a previous search? You can in Vista, it’s called Virtual Folders. Press the Orb (previously called the start button) and click search in the right hand of the popup. Alternatively, just hit Windows-F.

After you’ve refined your search (be sure to check out the Advanced Search drop down) and gotten the results you want hit the Save Search icon in the middle of the search screen. Assign it a name and any tags you want to associate with it (I found the tags useful for photo’s). Once saved a new Virtual Folder appears in your Searches folder and you can use it any time you want. What’s most slick about this is that they virtual folder gets updated on the fly! So any files that get changed, added or removed are updated in the search automagically!

Windows Vista lets you use hotkeys for the first 10 items in the Quick Launch menu. These hotkeys are assigned automatically, so there’s no need to do anything other than understand how they work.

For each icon in the Quick launch bar, the hotkey Win + number is assigned. These are assigned from left to right, 1-9 (and 0 for 10).

For instance, in the following screenshot, you’ll see that the first 4 icons are:

1. Show Desktop
2. Flip3D
3. Windows Media Player
4. Internet Explorer

That would mean the automatic hotkeys are assigned like this:

1. Win + 1   - Show Desktop:
2. Win + 2   - Flip3D:
3. Win + 3   - Windows Media Player
4. Win + 4   - Internet Explorer

Scraped from: HowToGeek

I’m big into customizing my desktop. I’ve been an Object Desktop user for years… and I’m in love with Windowblinds. I was stoked when I first heard about Vista’s Gadgets, but after running Vista I can tell you that they suck, take up space, and use up memory. It’s basically useless eye candy. Thankfully, disabling it is pretty simple. Just right click on the side bar or side bar icon, select properties and uncheck the “Start Sidebar when Windows starts” checkbox. Done. You’ll have to reboot to notice the effect, to close it without rebooting simply right click on the icon and select exit.

Windows task manager has finally received a much needed make over. Something that’s always irked me was that I’d see these processes but not necessarily know where they are running from. In Vista you can customize the processes tab. The easiest way to open task manager is to right-click anywhere on your task bar (or the clock) and select Task Manager from the popup. When task manager pops up, select the Processes tab. You’ll see a list of running applications, the user they are running under etc. With Vista you can add some additional useful info. At the top of the window select View -> Select Colums. When presented with the list select Image Path Name and Command Line and you’ll now see where your processes are executing. The screenshot below shows an example of what it will look like after you’ve made the change (click the thumbnail for a full screen image).

Vista’s start menu search box is one of the nicer touches to the new OS. In fact I rarely use the programs menu’s anymore and instead just start typing the name of the program I want to run. I’ve always been big on keeping my start menu clean. I create logical categories like Media for DVD burning software and graphic programs, System for antivirus and compression utils, Games for… duh… games, etc. For most users, their start menu is a nightmare.  You know who you are, you have folders that pop out under all programs that scroll out 2-3 levels deep.

With Vista you have Instant Search and you are never more than a few keystrokes away from whatever you’re looking for. This feature, which is available almost anywhere you are in Vista, enables you to search for a file name, a property, or even text contained within a file. It’s uber slick. Instant Search is also contextual, optimizing its results based on your current activity—whether it’s searching Control Panel applets, looking for music files in Windows Media Player, or looking over all your files and applications on the Start menu.

So with all this power, what is there to do? Tweak it! The biggest detraction from the search is that by default it searches an index of all files on your computer. Seriously, how often are you going to do that? Probably never, the search box isn’t a good use of searching for a file on your PC.

To change the settings right click on the Orb (previously called the start button) and click properties. You’ll see a dialog like the one to the left (click to see full size image), scroll down to the search options. I’ve disabled search files. As I said above, I don’t think the start menu is the right interface for searching for files across the entire pc. If you don’t use Windows mail and contact you can disable Search Communications. If you favor FireFox over IE, you can disable Search favorites and history too. If you are an IE user, you might wanna leave this on. I personally find this a LOT easier to find a webpage that I wanted to go to, but couldn’t remember, than the IE history. I suggest leaving Search Programs on… as that’s the seriously cool feature of Instant Search.

Wanna make your PC more productive? Need antivirus but don’t wanna pay? How about free image editors, office applications, or system utilities? PC World just released their 101 Fantastics Freebies. This is a really broad list of applications that you can score for free. Worth checking out for sure.

Sevenload is a photo/video sharing site based on of Germany which features geotag, tagging, secure storage system, Internet TV, etc. They’ve just received a fresh infusion of money and it’s been making the news lately. The layout is nice, and despite being in the news lately the site feels snappy and responsive. Sevenload of course supports all the features you’d expect, including integrating images and videos in your blog. There are already some browser extensions to make using the site even more productive. You can choose from an Opera Widget or a FireFox search plugin. You can checkout what the blogosphere is saying on Technorati or browse on over and check it out yourself!

English Sevenload

Yet another Twitter post! Twittervision is a mashup using Google maps to show a real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. To get your Twitter site listed on Twittervision you simply have to be a member of Twitter with a location and an image defined to appear on the public feed. Pretty simple! Then all you have to do is post.

Visit Twittervision.

If you’ve been following the Twitter craze this might be of interest to you… if you’re not sure what Twitter is the check out my post Twitter - what it is and what’s the point? for a brief overview before you start.

With the surge of hype surrounding Twitter lately, there will no doubt be some plugins/hacks/etc to leverage it. TwitThis is just that. TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

So basically you can provide a “Twitter friendly” link about your blog post. This link is smaller and formatted in a way that’s easier to use on Twitter. For example:

Turn this URL:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

gets converted into this tinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/6

It will also enable people to use those smaller URL’s over their mobile phones (as that seems to be the all the hype around Twitter use). Again, Twitter is probably geared more towards the younger crowd who want to provide up to the minute “here’s what the hell I’m doing NOW” kind of blogging. But that younger crowd is also heavy into SMS text messaging, mobile phone Internet, etc. The idea of TinyURL isn’t anything new, but this is a creative use of it that will allow users to blur the line between their existing blog and their Twitter accounts. If you’re a Wordpress user, they even have a plugin so you can plop this right into your existing site.

Link: TwitThis