More tips on Vista

Add Home Directory Icon to the Desktop in Windows Vista.

To do this, click the Start button, and then right click on your User name. Choose the Show on Desktop option:
That's it...Now your home directory icon should show up on your desktop.

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Display My Computer Icon on the Desktop in Windows Vista.

To put the Computer icon on the desktop, click the Start button, and then right-click on “Computer”

Click the “Show on Desktop” item in the menu, and your Computer icon will show up on the desktop.

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Hide, Delete, or Destroy the Recycle Bin Icon in Windows Vista.

Right-click and delete. It’s as simple as that.

Note: that you can also configure this from the Desktop Icon Settings in Personalization if you don't want to delete it.

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Hide Desktop Icon Text on Windows Vista.

Just right-click on the shortcut, and choose Rename. Now hold down the Alt key and type in 255 on the keypad to the right of the keyboard. You can’t use the number keys right above the keyboard, they won’t work. If you have a laptop, you can turn on numlock and then use the little number keys next to the regular letters. (You know you always wondered what they were for)



For the first shortcut on the desktop, a simple Alt+255 will do. For the next shortcut, you’ll have to enter the combination twice (Alt+255, Alt+255). For the third, 3 times… you get the idea.

The way this works is that the Alt+255 character is blank, so the shortcut filename is actually just named with a character that is completely blank. Since you can’t have two shortcuts or files named the exact same thing, the second shortcut will have to be named with two blank characters.

Now we have a sweet looking icon on the desktop, with no bothersome text beneath it.



This tip should actually work on any version of Windows, but it works a lot better on Vista, because Vista has beautiful icons.

If you use this tip to rename a folder, you will not be able to rename the folder back using the right-click rename. I’m not sure why this is. What you’ll have to do is open a command prompt and change directory into the containing folder (For instance, the desktop folder), and run this command:

ren “Alt+255” “NewFolderName”

You will need to actually type the Alt+255 characters where illustrated in the command. It will appear as a space.

Note that the Recycle Bin icon won’t work this way, you’ll have to
do this.

Hide the Recycle Bin Icon Text on Windows Vista.

Just download the registry patch, unzip, and then double-click on the file. You’ll get a bunch of UAC prompts asking if you really want to do this.

After the patch has been added, right click on the desktop and choose Refresh, and you should see your new Recycle Bin icon without the text:
HideRecycleBin.zip

If you want to restore the Recycle Bin icon text, you can download this registry patch instead, unzip, and then double-click on the file. Your recycle bin text will go back to normal.

ShowRecycleBin.zip

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Disable or Hide Optional Updates on Windows Vista.

Just open up Windows Update:

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.

If you ever decide you want to install the updates, 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.

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Built-in Quick Launch Hotkeys in Windows Vista
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).


The automatic hotkeys are assigned like this:

Win + 1 - Show Desktop:
Win + 2 - Flip3D:
Win + 3 - Windows Media Player
Win + 4 - Internet Explorer
( or what ever programs you have there)
To use Show Desktop use Win + D

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Create a Custom Boot Logo for Windows Vista
There’s a little utility that you can use to create the boot logo formats.

First you’ll need to download the Vista Boot Logo Generator 1.1 utility,

which we’ll use to create the correct logo image type. Once it’s installed, you need to make sure that you run the application as administrator:

We should choose an appropriate logo file. Since I’m a big fan of linux, and not as big a fan of Windows Vista, I chose an image of Tux making windows suck that I found over here.

Choose two versions of the image, one needs to be 800×600 at 24 bit color, and the other 1024×768 at the same color depth. Both files must be in Bitmap(BMP) format. Save the file somewhere like your desktop, because we can’t yet copy directly to the correct directory, until we take ownership of the file.

To take ownership of the file, you’ll have to open an administrator command prompt. (type cmd into the start menu search box, and hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter), and then run this command:

takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\en-US\winload.exe.mui

Now run this command, substituting geek for your username:

cacls C:\Windows\System32\en-US\winload.exe.mui /G geek:F

Now copy the file that you created into the C:\windows\system32\en-US\ directory. Make sure you choose the overwrite option.

Now you’ll need to use the msconfig utility. Just type msconfig into the start menu search box, and then click the Boot tab:


Check the “No GUI boot” option, and we’re all ready to reboot and test it out.

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Enable Hidden BootScreen in Windows Vista
Microsoft decided to hide a more visually appealing boot screen that can easily be enabled.

The hidden one, is called “Aurora”

All you have to do is type msconfig into the start menu search box, and hit enter.

Click the Boot tab, and then check the “No GUI boot” checkbox.

Hit OK and reboot the computer. You should see the new boot screen immediately.

Note: You may get a Windows Defender error on the next startup. You can enable the system config utility using the tray icon and this error will go away.

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Save 15 Keystrokes - Use Ctrl+Enter to Complete URL

On modern browsers, such as IE7 and Firefox, hitting Ctrl + Enter will automatically fill in the www. and the .com part of the URL.

example:

Just type in yahoo ( or what ever you want) into the address bar in your browser:



Now hit Ctrl + Enter together:



You saved yourself 15 keystrokes!

More Keystroke combinations:

Ctrl + Enter - Auto-complete *.com address
Shift + Enter - Auto-complete *.net address
Ctrl + Shift + Enter - Auto-complete *.org address
If you add Alt to any of those key combinations, it will auto-complete and open the new address in a new tab as well. Alt+Ctrl+Enter will auto-complete a *.com address in a new tab, for instance.


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