This post is about one of the most overlooked, yet one of the most welcomed, additions to Windows Vista: ReadyBoost. Now Veterans of the operating system (those who have been following it through the beta versions will already know about this, but they won’t be reading this blog anyway).

ReadyBoost is the best way available to improve the performance of your computer without actually adding more RAM to it. It makes use of any flash memory (USB Flash Drive, a Flash Card, your iPod, etc.) to “boost” the performance of your computer. It utilizes this flash device as a memory cache for accessing data on the hard drive. And without getting into too much detail, we assure you that this can really speed  up the performance of your computer.

How to make it work?

As soon as you insert a USB drive into your USB port, the AutoPlay dialogue pops up. This dialogue in Vista gives you an extra option as shown in the picture below:

As can be seen, the new option is “Speed up my system”. If you select this option Vista starts using the USB device as a memory cache.

Typically a flash memory is 80-100 times faster than the hard drive in read performance, and so this speeds up the access to the cached data, hence improving overall performance of the Operating System.

Note: some applications even depend on the presence of the ReadyBoost service and will not work properly without this service enabled, so do not turn off the service even if you don’t plan on using this by adding a Flash device.

Another way to enable ReadyBoost (in case you have AutoPlay off) is to access it from the properties of the Flash device. When you open the properties of the Flash Drive, you see a tab for ReadyBoost (see picture below):

As you can see, this also allows you to turn on ReadyBoost on the device. This also allows you to specify how much of the available space on the USB device do you want to use for ReadyBoost purposes.

This is also the place where you can turn off the ReadyBoost in case you turned it on earlier and now need your USB space.

Note: It is worth mentioning that ReadyBoost is probably even more beneficial to Laptop users than Desktop users for many reasons. First of all is the fact that laptops usually have smaller RAMs and slower hardware as compared to the desktops. This alone causes slower Vista performance. Other factors are that the laptop hard drives are usually slower than desktop hard drives (4800 rpm or 5400 rpm compared to 7200 rpm and above). Yet another factor is that if the hard drive is accessed less frequently (as it would be in case of ReadyBoost) it can power down and increase battery life of the laptop.

Well, that concludes a quick and crisp introduction to this very useful feature of Windows Vista. Let us know in comments how much imrovement you saw when employing ReadyBoost.

Windows Vista, as pretty as it looks, can still use some prettying up. Here’s a list of utilities (all developed by one person: Andreas Verhoeven) which contribute to improving the look and feel of your beautiful Windows Vista.

Glass Toasts - this allows your system tray notifications to have the Aero Glass look. This surely beats the relatively ugly looking tips that we see today. This one works on Windows XP as well. So, if you are still running XP, you can still give this a spin.

3D User Picture - this one is a favorite. It replaces the user picture in the Start Menu with a much better alternative: an animated 3-D picture.

This surely beats the comparatively dull looking picture that you get on the Start Menu.

This however comes at a small cost (nopes, you don’t need to pay for any licensing). The cost is that you need to have a DirectX capable Graphics card for this to work.

Thumbnail Resizer - this one is really good for those of you who have high resolution monitors and so those thumbnails  that are show when you hover above the taskbar buttons become really small. This allows you to resize the thumbnails to suit your vision. The source code is available for this if you want to see how it is working under the hood.

To get a hold of all these cool tools, visit Ave’s Vista Stuff. He has another tool up there for you to checkout.

If you are facing problems registering an OCX file on Windows Vista even though you are logged in as an administrator, its probably the UAC kicking in. But this post is not about UAC, but about what can be done quickly to resolve this.

What you need to do is that you need to open a command prompt with elevated privileges in order to register that OCX file. To do that:

1. Press the Windows Key.
2. Type ‘cmd’.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
4. Press Alt+C to confirm and continue with your activity (this is the dialog box which is asking you whether you want to run in an elevated mode).

Once you have done all that, you should have a command prompt open which is in an elevated mode. You should try registering your OCX file now.

Obviously, this technique can be used for other purposes as well.

Note: Some people try to do this by pressing Windows Key+R and then typing cmd followed by Ctrl+Shift+Enter. This does not work.

After a long time waiting, Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista is finally out. If you use Yahoo Messenger for your IM needs, then you will really like this specially-made-for-Windows-Vista release of Yahoo Messenger.

As you can see in the image, the new version has beautiful graphics. That is the biggest change. It uses the Aero features to deliver a very pretty looking UI.

However, beautiful UI is not the only change that is present. There are some more features that have been added to the messenger with a large number of features promised over the next few months.

We go over some of the new features that are now available in this ‘Preview’ of the Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

Skins

There is a capability of skinning the Yahoo Messenger window. Not only that, there is the capability to skin individual conversation Windows. This allows you to keep the visualization interesting once you have a number of conversartions going on. It remembers the skin that you choose for a given contact so that when you open a conversation with that contact again, it will use the same skin.

Sidebar Gadgets

There is the capability of dragging a contact to the Vista Sidebar. This allows you to track the status of and quickly access your more common contacts.

Tabs

This is a feature that I like a lot. If you have multiple conversations going, you no longer need to have so many windows open. Each conversation can appear as a tab in one conversation window. All you have to do is to drag mutltiple conversations in the same window and it will add it as a new tab.

Contact Scaling

You can choose a bigger size to see contact images or avatars on your messenger window. Not only can I see contacts in a bigger mode, if I resize the main Window to make it bigger, the contact list switches to a multi-column mode to show more contacts (as in the image below).

Emoticons

The emoticons are now handled differently. When you receive or send an emoticon, it animates in a bigger size before going back to the normal size.

This is just a preview release and Yahoo has provided a feedback button on each window to let users give feedback for improvement. Let’s see what changed come about between now and the final release.

Vista has a number of keyboard shortcuts (just like Windows XP used to have). To see a complete list of shortcuts, you can visit Microsoft Help Pages. However, we are sure that everyone knows what Ctrl+C does and what Ctrl+V does (copy and paste respectively, just in case). We are also certain that not everyone wants to know what pressing LeftALT+LeftSHIFT+NumLock does (it toggles Mouse Keys). So we have put together a list of 10 not so well known, yet pretty useful shortcuts.

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This comic from Brainstuck.com best describes the feeling that most people have when they consider Windows Vista. And it is not too unrealistic at all. Although a lot of the bad news about Windows Vista is due to the fact that everyone likes to bash Microsoft; and a lot of it is because we typically like to resist change. Here is what we think the story is…

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We announced the official launch of Windows DreamScene earlier last month. And now that is has been out for some time, there is a need for further investigation. As we mentioned, at it’s core, DreamScene allows you to have Videos as your desktop wallpapers. This of course has the potential to create breathtaking effects, and the ability to convert the boring desktop into something much more interesting. And since, a lot of people have already done much work with DreamScene, we will just link to them below:

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In the first part of this topic, I explained how to manage multiple time zones using the additional clocks feature of Windows Vista. However, this approach had two shortcomings:

• You could only add 2 additional clocks
• You could not have a permanent view of the various time zones and you had to hover/click the system tray time to view the other clocks.

In this post, we discover a way which allows you to do both of the above.

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A lot of us work in businesses which require us to manage meetings with people in various time zones. The old fashioned way of doing this was by hanging multiple clocks on you wall, each set for the time zone that you do business in. Well, with Windows Vista, that has changed. Windows Vista allows you to configure multiple clocks on your PC. And we will tell you how.

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I talked about the Search features in Windows Vista a couple of weeks ago. We had just barely scratched the surface when it comes to search in Vista at that time.

In this article, I will talk about a few of the less obvious search enhancements available in Vista, which however are far more powerful and useful.

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