No system is an island - Using Windows And Tech Step By Step

Vista comes with a lot of easter eggs and some of them use screensavers to get activated.

Remember the cool swirling colorful screensaver in Mac OSes?

This same type of screensaver (Aero screensavers in Vista) can be set as a desktop background using the easter eggs.

I will show the most common ones in Vista.Do note that the activated easter eggs will lock the access to Windows desktop (with desktop icons vanished)and they can be terminated anytime using the Alt + F4 key or from task manager by ending the associated .scr process.

Open command prompt (Start > Run > cmd)with administrator privileges.
Go to Windows\system32 directory.



Type the following each for a different easter egg:

1. ribbons.scr /p65552
2. aurora.scr /p65552
3. bubbles.scr /p65552
4. mystify.scr /p65552



The interesting thing here is when this is done on a dual display system with extended desktop.The primary display will have the easter egg active while the secondary display will still have the original Vista wallpaper.

Feel free to mess around with these eggs,they are very cool.

Peace.

Windows Vista 32-bit version shows less than 4 GB RAM installed when in fact that capacity is actually installed due to 32-bit architecture limitations.

It is not necessary to expect that if you install more than 4 GB RAM in Vista,it will provide better performance because it can't see more than the above limit by default.If you really need to leverage more,than use the 64-bit Vista versions for better performance.

Anyway,the amount of RAM that can be recognized by 32-bit Vista can be changed by the in-built bcdedit command.BCDEDIT - Boot Configuration Data Store Editor is what was boot.ini in earlier Windows versions.

To change the memory capacity to more than 4 GB,use the following command from command prompt with administrative privileges:

bcdedit /set PAE forceenable



Successful output will show operation completed successfully.

What this command does is enable Physical Address Extension (PAE) within the boot config store to see more RAM present in Vista.

To reverse the command,simply type at command prompt :

bcdedit /deletevalue PAE



For more technical info on this,this Microsoft KB article is the place to be.

Hope this has been an informative post.

There are some great themes for Windows Vista but one really cool theme is the Vista to Leopard transformation pack.

Download it from here.

Installing it is quite straight forward.Once the setup is downloaded,run it.





Accept the license agreement and select All the options for the best possible effects of the OS X transformation pack.

Once setup is complete,reboot Vista once.The start and shutdown screen in Vista will now be that of Mac OSX.



To apply the theme,right click on Desktop and select Personalize > Theme.



Select VistaOSX theme and apply the changes.

Notice that how the Vista wallpaper changes to that of Leopard and the dockable bar appears just like in OS X.



The Windows logo is now replaced with Apple logo (yes it is the same Microsoft Windows,just the theme has changed :) ).

Enjoy.

Windows Vista comes with a handy set of tools for diagnosing and troubleshooting system problems.This is under the "Performance Information and Tools" section.

Wouldn't it be handy if we can glance at all the system issues in one go and can immediately correct them?

Vista provides this capability of reporting existing system problems and also fixes them on own be it an outdated driver or some system settings that are not compatible with the system.

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools.Click on the Advanced Tools link.



Notice the Performance issues tab there.This will have all the problems that exist in Vista and which can be fixed in a jiffy.





Here Vista has reported display settings as sub-optimal.Clicking on the problem will pop up a dialog box with a very useful event viewer link pinpointing the reported problem that helps in tracking down the exact error in Vista.



This feature saves a lot of troubleshooting time as well as ensures that all reported problems can be fixed on own by Vista like a self tuning system.

Hope this has been an informative post.

Peace.

Processors generate a lot of heat and this can be a reason for many computer problems like random restarts,abrupt shutdowns and so on.
The overheating becomes amplified in case of dual processor systems and hence it is essential to at least have some kind of tool that reports the processor temperature.

Core Temp is a very small yet quite handy tool for this purpose.It reports the temperature of each individual core in each processor in your system real time and is completely motherboard independent.

Using it is as simple as it can get.Launch the executable file of Core Temp and notice how it displays the temperature of cores in a system :



Just like all reporting tools,the information can be logged for future references and the tool can be customized by going to Options > Settings.
Select the Enable Logging option and save the changes.





This will now generate a csv file in the directory where Core Temp is installed named Temp Log.csv

The visual indication of core temperature can be directly found in system tray with blue and red digits which are the reported temperatures of core.



Feel free to give Core Temp a try,it is quite useful.

Peace.

Windows Vista by default doesn't come with Telnet service installed.

If you use remote login extensively to connect to a Vista system,I would recommend SSH for that as it is far more secure than telnet which doesn't encrypt communication between client and server.

Installing telnet(client as well as server)in Vista is quite a straight forward process.By default,if command "telnet" is issued in Vista,you will see an error message like this :



In XP,Add/Remove Programs used to install many services like IIS etc which by default didn't come installed.

To install telnet on Vista,go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.This will need administrative rights.



Here select both - telnet server and client.An information box will pop up after this indicating that the selected services are getting installed on Vista :



Once installed,type telnet at the Windows command prompt and this time,it will show the console for telnet connections.



We have installed telnet client as well as telnet server.However telnet server service needs to be started from services console so that incoming telnet connections are accepted by the Vista system.

Go to Start > Run > services.msc and select Telnet,right click on Properties and hit the Start button for the service to start.



We now have configured Vista to accept inbound Telnet connections(server) as well as to connect to other Telnet supported devices(client).

All done.

Hope this has been an informative post.

Till Windows XP,there was no extended support by default for IPv6,only for IPv4 addresses (those are 32-bit in length like 10.10.1.1,255.255.255.0 and so on).

With Vista comes the in-built support for IPv6 addresses (these are long ones with 128-bit length like 2002:c058:6301::c058:6301)which can't be removed unlike in XP. So if we want to renew or release dynamic IP addresses depending upon their type like whether they are IPv4 or IPv,we can do that quite easily thanks to the cool set of IPv6 commands that come bundled with the ipconfig tool in Vista.

Finding which commands works with IPv4 or IPv6 in ipconfig is easy.
Go to Start > Run > cmd and in the command prompt,type ipconfig/?.

This will display all associated commands that can be used with ipconfig :



Note the commands with 6 as the suffix - /release6 and /renew6.
These take care of IPv6 addresses in releasing them and reassigning them in case the system takes dynamic IPv6 addresses from a DHCP server.

For dynamic IPv4 addresses,the good old commands - ipconfig/release and ipconfig/renew still hold true,the new command above are only for IPv6 dynamically assigned addresses.

Peace.