PaulSpoerry.com

Open source application Blue Lock monitors the proximity of your Bluetooth phone or device and automatically locks your computer whenever it’s out of range (e.g., you’ve walked away from your computer). The usefulness will depend on the strength of your Bluetooth devices, since it’s not really going to do its job if you’ve got a strong signal and receiver that keeps a connection from across the office. But if it works well with your Bluetooth devices, Blue Lock provides a simple way to keep your computer secure when you step away for a few seconds but forget to hit Win-L to lock your workstation. Blue Lock is free, Windows only.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that my phone DOES pair with my laptop, I couldn’t get Bluelock to work. I currently have an HTC Touch (Sprint Touch aka HTC Vogue). Bluelock flat out won’t find my phone. Ce la vi… maybe it’ll work for you cuz it sounds like an awesome concept.

Blue Lock website

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.

I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.