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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).