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CyberNet offers a simple tweak for increasing the size of the Alt-Tab thumbnail previews in Vista:

One of Vista’s features that I use all of the time is the new Alt-Tab for switching between applications. Unlike Windows XP, Vista actually shows thumbnails for each application that you are running so that it is easier to identify what you’re looking for. And they just aren’t screenshots either like a lot of the imitators in XP, instead they show live previews of the application. Overall, it is just really nice.

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The above is what the default Alt-Tab looks like in Windows Vista, and if you click on the image you’ll see the full-size version. That’s on a 1920×1200 screen, which makes it obvious that it doesn’t take up the whole width of the screen. Unfortunately Microsoft did not scale the width of the Alt-Tab based upon the size of the monitor.

If I’m running Vista on a monitor capable of 1920×1200, I want to utilize the space available. And as it stands, Alt-Tab shows 7 previews in a row before it creates a new row. I’d rather leave that number alone and have it make the thumbnails bigger when I have a larger resolution available.

That’s when I came across this site which gives some registry settings that you can modify to change the width of each thumbnail, and ultimately the size of the Alt-Tab display. To change the size just download this registry file, and after it is on your computer, right-click on it and select Merge. This will import it into your registry using the values I’ve specified in the file (optimized for displays that are 1680×1050).

The first thing you might want to do before Merging the file is to open it in Notepad (or any text editor) and adjust the MaxThumbSizePx to match something close to your resolution.

1024×768: MaxThumbSizePx = 00000078
1280×1024: MaxThumbSizePx = 0000009E
1680×1050: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000d2
1920×1200: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000f5

You do not need to restart your computer to see the changes, they should be instant. This is what the end result looks like on my 1920×1200 monitor (yeah, compare this to the screenshot above):

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If you don’t like how it looks, and don’t want to mess around with it, you can always revert back to the old Vista Alt-Tab dimensions by removing the following “folder” from the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Windows’
CurrentVersion’Explorer’AltTab

That will delete all of the settings that you just entered in, and the Alt-Tab appearance will revert back to how it was previous to importing the values into the registry. If you wanted to mess with all of the values, it might be easier to open the registry editor, findi the location above, and edit the values there since you can enter them in as a normal decimal number:

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If you’re like me, you keep your system up to date and patched. It’s good practice, but a bit annoying under Vista (at least under Ultimate Edition) because even if you’ve applied all the updates you need you’re constantly shown that you have 14 optional updates. Turns out they’re all language packs… I’m pretty sure I don’t need Chinese or Dutch language packs installed.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to hide them from view. Open Windows Update and click on View available updates. You’ll see something like this:

Notice all the languages that you’ll never have a need to use. All you have to do to hide these updates, is to right-click on an item in the list, and choose “Hide update” from the menu.

Pretty easy eh? Now when you go to Windows Update you’ll see what you expect: “No new updates available…”. If you ever want them back there’s a “Restore hidden updates” link on the left-hand side of the screen that will let you put them back in the list.

I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network neighborhood, but can be accessed by using \\computername\C$. The “$” at the end of a share name makes it invisible to network browsing, but otherwise it is a regular share. As the name implies, administrative shares are only available to those in the Local Administrators security group. This is turned off by default in Vista. Bummer, it’s so handy… I guess that’s part of the big security push. *shrug*

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Add a new DWORD called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.

How many auto updates have you received since you installed Vista? I bet it’s not anywhere near 100! TheHotFix.net has what THEY call Vista SP1. Pay attention here because this is NOT Microsoft’s Service Pack 1 release. In fact I bet this package pisses MS off to no end. I’m suprised they haven’t been slapped with a court order to take it down. But if you’ve got an issue with Vista check the site out, they may have the fix you need.

If you travel over to TheHotFix.net’s VistaSP1.net page you’ll find a listing of 86 different Vista fixes. They also have what they call their Vista SP1 Preview pack which contains over 100 fixes.

Here’s the linkage: VistaSP1.net