After installing vista, obtain and install the service pack immediately:

Vista - SP1 Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave1.exe

The chances of having any trouble with the service pack are very small and it fixes some major bugs. It is not true that after installing SP1, some users were lifted off the ground by invisible tentacles and torn limb from limb.

Get rid of this by checking the box in the lower left corner.

My thinking has changed about hiding the protected operating system files. Displaying them makes a mess and in most cases, even as a developer, I don't need to see them. The exception is the user's home directory, which I explicitly unhide in the next step.

User directories are now subdirectories of C:\Users which is a nice short path. Not so nice is the fact that your own directory is by default a hidden system directory. This means that you can't copy the path to any of your own directories from the address bar using the right-click copy url feature. (See below.) A more serious limitation is that programs such as the HTTP or FTP servers can't be configured to see anything in your home directory.

To fix this, open the command window at top of your C drive. You need to run it in Administrator mode. To do that, browse to the shortcut: Start Menu - Programs - Accessories - Command Prompt. Right-click on the Command Prompt icon and select "Run as Administrator." Then execute these incantations:

This will make your home directory behave as a normal directory in all respects. (This is important for FTP configuration. See below.)

After installing Vista, you get a personal home folder shortcut on the desktop that points to "c:\users\yourname"

But this shortcut is special: you can't search for files with Agent Ransack or see the directory hierarchy when you open it by double-clicking in Explorer.

To fix this, open Computer\Users\Yourname. Now drag the icon from the navigation bar to the desktop. It will have a name like "Shortcut to yourname".

Now throw away the original "yourname" shortcut and rename the new one to simply "Documents". Everything will now work the way you'd expect a file system to work if it was designed by human beings.

There are directories and files you can't see even when you select view options to show hidden system files. For example, when you access secure websites that prompt for a username and password, Windows offers to remember these credentials. They are saved as "super hidden" files in this directory:

If you look in this folder, nothing is visible. To makes these files visible, you need to make the following registry change:

Change the value of ShowSuperHidden to 1 and then restart Explorer. It is useful to see these files because you may want to delete all of them. I do this when debugging security settings on remote websites. You might also want to erase your credentials if the computer will be used by others.

Right click on the clock and configure Internet Time to use the server: 132.163.4.101 (This option is not available in Vista Home.)

This is the major Vista Annoyance.

There is an alternative to totaly shutting off UAC. You will find on the web a program called TweakUAC. This will allow you to put UAC into "quiet mode". This will protect you from some evils on the internet without bothering you 24/7 with dialog boxes. It is possible to configure UAC to use quiet mode without downloading this program, but it is a Very Complex Process.

Start, Control Panel, Security Center: Hit "Change the way Security Center alerts me" and change to "Don't notify me and don't display the icon".

In the Administrator command window:

If you ever want it back on:

"Remote Differential Compression" is a Vista feature that speeds up file transfers between computers linked using an acoustic coupler modem. It is enabled by default, but these modems have been quite rare since 1980. It reduces peformance when transfering files on a LAN, unless you're using Dixi cups and a string instead of ethernet.

Remote Differential Compression comes into play when you copy a file to a remote destination so it replaces a file with the same name. Signatures are computed for each block on the destination side and the results are sent back so only the blocks that have changed get copied. As you might imagine, this takes far more time that it's worth 99.999993 percent of the time.

To get rid of it, open Control Panel/Programs and Features, Turn Windows features on or off, Deselect "Remote Differential Compression".

This adjustment combined with the previous tip will restore network file transfer speeds to Windows XP levels. (Tests were documented on the webpage where I found this stuff.)

Run the command window, but right-click to select "Run as Administrator". In the command window type:

Autotuning was one of those ideas that sounded good to marketing.

You can re-degrade the performance of file transfers using this command:

You can improved disk drive performance a lot by enabling advanced features on the drive. (Some of these features only work on SATA drives.)

Using the system control panel, open the device damager, open the disk drives section, and select the drive you want to speed up. Right-click to open the Properties window. Select the Policies tab.

DANGER: If you do this change, you will be a very sad panda if you get a power failure during disk operations. Microsoft recommends that you don't use this feature unless you have an UPS. It should NOT be used on laptops, especially if you're one of those jokers who keeps his battery in the refrigerator.

The old standby Control-Alt-Delete no longer displays the task manager, but rather a large screen-filling display of mostly-useless options. The new combination to open the task manager is:

You can also access the task manager from the right-click menu popup on the task bar.

There is a nice GUI where you can turn off lots of interesting things:

Windows hibernation background services can use a large amount of system resources. If you don't use the Hibernate feature on a regular basis you may want to disable it to give Vista a performance boost.

Start, Control Panel, Power Options, Change Plan settings, Change Advanced Power Settings, Sleep, Hibernate after, reduce number of minutes down to 0 (never). UPDATE: "Never" is now the default after a new installation. (At least this was true on a tower.)

This is a mysterious problem that crops up when you fiddle too much with the start menu. The fix is easy:

Right click the desktop, click 'Personalize' at the bottom of the menu, click 'Change desktop icons' on the left side, in the window that pops up click 'Restore default', press 'Apply', then press 'Ok'.

IF the Apply button is greyed out, change something such as displaying the control panel or one of the other check boxes. Then you can press apply. As soon as the mysteriouis "Start Menu" shortcut goes away, you can uncheck whatever you changed.

Vista runs many processes in the background that may not be useful in your situation. Here are a few that I like to turn off:

A very nice site that describes what all the Vista services do along with prescriptions for removing them is at

In XP, you could see the path to the current folder in the address bar. Vista shows a sequence of menus instead. To get the old view, left click in an empty part of the address bar. You will see the file path XP-style. If you just want to copy the paty to the clipboard, right-click on an empty area of the address bar and select: "Copy address as text"

When you create a shortcut, the name gets a default prefix "Shortcut to" appended. Shortcuts are easily identified by their arrow overlay, so the extra text is simply annoying.

After a mysterious delay, Vista ignores your folder settings and/or rearranges Explorer settings in random ways.

Fixing this requires a simple registry hack. Copy the lines between the ***s to a notepad file "doit.reg"

Save the file, right-click on the icon and select "Merge". You have to reboot and you may have to fiddle with your settings one more time. Make the changes you want to the top level "Computer" view and then "Tools - Folder Options - View - Apply to Folders" This should be a permanent fix. You might want to combine this fix with the next one:

Vista has a feature that causes folders to take on special behaviors when they contain files of special types. For example, if you store an mp3 file in folder, it becomes a "music" folder and all of the listing headers change. If you store an image file in a folder, it becomes a "picture" folder and all sorts of useless features are enabled. This concept is annoying beyond human comprehension: What happens if you have a project folder with a mixture of file types? The people who design GUI software at Microsoft obviously don't use a computer for any personal projects. Instead, they try to imagine how a complete moron would organize a very small number of files. "Duh... Lemme see. These are my Word documents. All them go in here. These are my pictures. All them go in there. These are my songs. They all go down there. O.K. Me ORGANIZED!"

This fix will make all folders act like normal file folders no matter what kind of files you store inside.

"Commmand Window Here" was available as a shell extension installed by a Windows XP PowerToy. It gave you a context menu selection to open a command window with the default directory set to the selected directory.

It turns out this is built into Vista: Hold the shift key down when you right-click on a folder. A selection for "Open Command Window Here" will appear in the context menu.

But having to hold down the shift key is obviously an intolerable annoyance: Here's a quick registry fix that will make it visible all the time as it was in XP:

In the unlikely event that you would like to undo this change, the orignal value of Extended is an empty string:

Vista comes with an Accessory to clip rectangular areas of the screen. This is nice for documenting applications. (You can still do CTL-ALT-PrintScreen to clip the entire window.)

To start the Snipping Tool, select it from the Start Menu - Programs - Accessories menu. You can now click and drag a selection rectangle to capture any part of the screen to the clipboard.

This is a system service that indexes all your files so they can be searched with the useless Windows Desktop Search feature. Unfortunately, it won't search or even recognize the kinds of text files programmers create. Since I can't rely on it, I prefer to use the free program "Agent Ransak" and do away with the overhead of indexing the whole computer.

Stop it if it is running and then set the startup type to "manual" so it won't start again.

Ah Vista! Is there nothing it cannot break? You will soon discover that it takes nearly freaking forever to empty the trash. The origins of this defect have conflicting reports and I must confess that I don't have a perfect fix. On my systems, I disable the holding feature of the recycle bin: Right-click on the Recycie Bin, select Properties and select: "Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted." Of course doing this eliminates the possibility of recovering a file if you make a mistake. I prefer this sacrifice to locking up the desktop for half and hour at unexpected times.

Most people put up with names like "Local Area Connection", but when you have several network cards, it becomes difficult to remember where they are going.

You can rename "Local Area Connection" to "Office LAN", and so on with your other interfaces. I often have a second card called "ControllerLAN" for example. Just right-click on the name you see on the network control panel and select Rename.

The software management control panel is called "Programs and Features". There is a button to "Turn Windows Features on or off". On the Windows Features panel, open "Internet Information Services" and open the section "FTP Publishing Service". Inside, check "FTP Management Console" and "FTP Server".

After installation, you need to make the associated system service start automatically. Open Administrative Tools/Services, select "FTP Publishing Service", right click and change the startup type to "Automatic."

In Vista, you must eplicitly open the filewall for FTP access on the firewall control panel. A checkbox exists for the ftp protocol.

After installing the IIS FTP server, you can enable anonymous access, which will let the controller log in with username "anonymous" and password "guest". This eliminates the need to create a new user account.

To do this, select the "Security Accounts" tab on the IIS FTP server panel and check "Allow anonymous connections." You may also want to disable write access using the same panel. After this change, remote users can log in with the username "anonymous". The password can be any string. Remote users will only be able to see the FTP directory you designate.

This has nothing to do with the Windows Guest account, which you may choose to leave disabled.

If you keep your projects in your home folder, you will notice that you can't browse to this location when setting the FTP server home directory.

For example, for a user named "Goop" the directory c:\Users\Goop exists, but you can't see it using Explorer.

To fix this problem, open the command window in the C:\Users directory and type this command:

Now you can configure the ftp server to use directories inside projects you keep in your home directory.

To access a directory via anonymous ftp, one more step is required to set the security attributes. To make a directory called "bin" the ftp home directory:

After you have the ftp home directory configured, you can throw away the top level directory c:\inetpub (Unless you have the websever running from that location.)

You miss HyperTerminal???

A very good terminal emulator, open source and actively supported, is "Putty". It does serial, telnet, and SSH. It comes with an SFTP client as well. I've used this for many years and nothing else comes close.

When you run putty, you can select the saved session and then press Open, but this is a pain. Putty stores the configuations you save internally, so there is no such thing as a document you can simply launch from the desktop. Instead, create a desktop shortcut to putty with these parameters:

This shortcut will open the saved session called Com1 and give you a terminal window ready to use.

You can also create telnet sessions to connect to running VxWorks systems. The procedure should be obvious from the serial example.

Get OpenOffice instead. Configure it to open and save Microsoft Office formats and you'll forget you don't have office.

The procedure is a little different with Vista:

Note: Under some conditions I don't yet understand, Vista will not render cleartype fonts on web pages that specify font styles explicity in the html. On my own web pages, I simply deleted references to font-style in the css and they started rendering with cleartype. Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP seemed to work much better. But then again, what didn't?

Here are a few basic programs I always install. All are free.

This only useful if you have webdav directories set up on a remote server. Webdav won't work at all with Vista or Vista SP1, but Microsoft has published a secret patch:

I saved a copy as:

After this fix, you can mount webdav resources with no fuss:

You DO NOT have to meddle with the url by adding port numbers, etc. You DO need to have an SSL certificate and https configured on the server. Note that mounted webdav, ftp, and other remote network directories appear in the desktop Computer folder, NOT the Network folder as in XP.

With this patch, Vista webdav actually works better than XP.

I like a very minimal Start Menu. It doesn't take long to do these because most of them are in the same key. You can make a ".reg" file following the pattern shown in the "Fix forgotten Folder View Settings" section that will do all of the changes at once. (Right-click "Merge" on the .reg file.)

The start menu contains only shortcuts, which you are free to reorder to suit your needs, rather than the needs of insane marketing goobs (IMGS) who want to flog you with the name of their company. Take control of your computer.

Right click on the start menu and select "Explore All Users" Create a new folder in the Programs directory called "Start Menu Refuse".

Drag everything else in the Programs menu into this folder. Now create your own category folders and put in only the startup shortcuts for the programs you actually use.

Here is my current Start Menu. Obviously your preferences will be different, but this illustrates how a functional layout is created, rather than accepting the default "marketing" layout.

After you install new software, drag whatever new things appear in the start menu into the Start Menu Refuse folder. Then copy out only the shortcut(s) you need to the appropriate category folder. I keep the Start Menu Refuse folders intact in case I leave something out I find necessary later.