Okay so i have been using Vista (ultimate version) for a while now, and the gadgets are great and really handy, so i have complied what i think is the Top Ten Vista gadgets which everyone must have!

Okay the ten gadgets below are not in a particular order of top ten,  they are my favourite ten vista gadgets all are helpful in some way to me and makes it all a bit easier!

The UK Radio Player, is a great little gadget, you can add any online radio feed, and its just nice and easy to use, just have it in the corner and click play when ever i fancy some music. (and I’m not already blasting it that is!)

I came across this gadget the other day, and it is helpful to me, as i am a web host to keep tabs on my server, simple little gadget pings my server every few seconds to check its still online, so if it isn’t i can do something about it, only thing i can complain about is it only allows up to 5 servers, and the height is fixed, so when you have one server it still has a huge gap, and my gadget space is valuable to me!

The Top Process gadget is really handy, it shows the Top three CPU and RAM hogging programs, so i can easily see whats using what without having to open Task Manager, great easy gadget, could be improved if it had the ability to end task as well, but I am not sure how that feature could be added.

Volume control: I used to use another volume control gadget and when i re-installed the other day, i lost the gadget but when i went to re-download it from the Gadget Gallery instead i found this one which looks much nicer and has a few more features.

CPU Gadget, this definitely had to be the most “used” gadget, always handy to check how hard I’m working my system, helps me know when i need to easy off a bit to avoid problems.

RSS Feed Reader, Only recently have i started properly using this great little gadget, its one which comes default with Vista, and is nice and simple, you subscribe to a thread (through IE) and they show up, you can select to show 10-100 items, select a single feed of just one, handy tool to keep up to date with goings on, I started to use it to try and learn a bit more and be more in with whats going on with the Web, and also an attempt to get more ideas of things i can talk about both on my blog, and on my Radio show.

Notes, yes this is a simple little gadget comes with Vista by default like the CPU monitor and RSS feed reader, its a Handy note pad on your desktop to jot something down to remember later, i was (and admittedly still am) guilty of having a desk covered in little piles of yellow sticky pad notes, most of which are in unreadable handwriting or just end up lost and forgotten. So in that sense it is a handy little gadget, also means i don’t have quite so many random .txt files on my desktop with random things in. However a bad note (no pun intended… okay that’s a blatant lie.. anyway) is its quite a small area, and would be a very handy if you could extend the note pad so you don’t have to scroll down the note o read it all however i am not sure how easy this could be done on Vista Gadgets, it would be good though if it was possible.

 Weather Gadget, never bother to use it before the other day, but its pretty good does a variety of weathers, and it does my local area (Swindon) so I am happy.

Calendar again one of the pre-installed gadgets with Vista, but its something which i use daily, much easier to give it a glance and see today’s date etc in nice big letters, without having to faff about hovering over the clock like i used to especially when i am busy working on scripts or working with clients. 

Clock, okay this really doesn’t need a description of any kind, but i have to admit having a nice easy to ready clock on the right hand top corner of my first screen is a lot easier to read than a small time in the corner. So again it is a basic gadget which can really speed up little things you do when on the PC.

Okay that’s it that’s my Top Ten Vista Gadgets, all helpful all great.

Now when looking through the Vista Gadget Gallery I have seen literally thousands of gadgets which all have almost identical gadgets which do the same thing, and there are a lot of “Search” gadgets, like YouTube or Google and when i first got Vista i tried them and soon realised for me at least they were more annoying than there were useful, i almost always have a webpage open, and it is much easier to manually open the page than to use the often ugly gadgets which just waste my Desktop space.

 So here’s my first of what will hopefully be many Top Ten lists, hope you enjoy and find it useful.

Dan

Okay, now a lot of people especially “enthusiasts” have warned me off of Vista, and i have had a few suggest the best thing i should do would be to delete Vista and go to Linux. While i am a “enthusiast” i still am (unfortunately) still clueless with Linux and am, okay i guess i can say it, I’m a Windows person!

I have upgraded from Windows XP Professional (SP2) to Vista Ultimate, and have to say i have yet to have any major problems what so ever, I was expecting to not like Vista, or at least find it so amazingly terrible to use i would think O’well its not worth it and continue with my XP Pro. But i didn’t, and now i have fully upgraded and no longer have any other Windows version installed.

Vista is a much smoother user expeience and has incorporated many features and software which usually would require seperate software, such as speach reconition. After trying out the speach reconition i had to decide it should be a area MS should improve on for Vienna…

Vista seems to recover much faster and much more gracefully from Non-Responsive programs, Vista gives the choice to wait for it to sort itself out while you can still go about your business of close it down; And when you do have to close the program i often found with XP it took it’s good time to actually close where-as Vista (usually) closes it with out problem.

Drivers:

Now we all know how windows is infamous for its drivers, “I brought the game pad it had a windows disc, Mac simply doesn’t need it” we’ll i hope I’m not jinxing it by saying it seems that Microsoft have finally got off the backsides and have made this not a problem. I have yet to install a driver on my PC where as if i was to install XP fresh i know by now i would have installed a minimum of at least 8 for all my mother board devices and externals, Vista now handles drivers discreetly and with its management system you can easily select which drivers you wish to upgrade, without the operating system nagging you.

Incompatibility?

One of the major reasons i first kept XP installed as dual  boot was after reading quite a bit i thought i would be “better safe than sorry” if i have a program which i can’t install, however i have yet to come across this problem, and when/if i do i know i should still be able to successfully run it using backward compatibility -  the same which XP had so you could run as 95/98 etc…

However one problem with compatibility i used to use McAfee security, which Vista is not compatible with, and i am told Norton is the security of choice as it works with Vista new Defender.

Vista security centre is supposed to be the most secure ever, and it seems to live up to its name till now, i have yet to bother to actually install any external security – i should really get round to it.

Yes it is a fact.  Vista is designed to be flashy! Vista has to be one of the most Visually appealing Operating Systems on the market. Many have pointed out the rather blatant truth that it appears a hell of a lot of the design ideas have been “borrowed” from the Mac OS X with a few sutler differences… Mac has Widgets…. Vista they called them Gadgets… how clever im sure no one will know.

One of the nicer visual elements of Vista i have noticed is the live views of windows, when you over over a tab in the task-bar it shows a little box of that window, in real time video and all. This also extends to the new flashy window changer (WIN KEY + TAB) which enables users to flick through their windows which i personally LOVE i think it is a fantastic new feature which is very useful, especially as i have Dual screen – (not that I’m boasting)

 Now for some of the bad bits, Vista has some security feature where if you have a higher IQ than a teaspoon start to get annoying after about 1.3 minutes of using the system. The system has a handy feature to request permission to preform Administrative tasks and feature which almost all “Power Users” will use daily if not more. Simple things like viewing all users processes in the Task Manager needs a multiple choice survey. After a couple of days i found you can end up screaming at a screen because every other mouse click seems to need written permission and a doctors note.

However today in-fact i have been tweaking my system and have removed these pests from my account and can now use it uninterrupted.

I have posted a tutorial on how to disable the UAC.

“The WOW starts here”

While windows Vista certainly brings in the eye-candy and a visual WOW, there is still much room for improvment.

Window Vista now has UAC (User Account Control) which is designed to increase security for users.

Vista’s UAC (as seen below) displays a option message when a program requires elevation, This in lamans terms means whenever a program needs Admin authority you get asked, even if you are already a administrator.

Many development users argue that this “feature” has been implemented for a good reason and should be left enabled.

Unlike other OS’s (Operating Systems) like Linux and Mac OS many windows users (including myself) run with Administrative accounts for general use when it is unneeded, because of software developers who also run as Admin while developing their softwares often end up producing software which requires Admin authority even though it doesnt need it causing the cycle of users using admin accounts to run the software.

This feature also helps protect against Malware, because it will produce the alert if it is doing a action which is unusual, as well as to protect the user form them selves. Which for many users is a VERY good thing! The alert systems shows users when they are about prform a action which could effect their computer in a unwanted way.

However for many power users and often jsut users who know how to use a computer the UAC alert feature gets extermeally annouying, i myself have found actions i preform on a daily basis requires continued authorisation, such as showing all processes in the taskbar and running Dos prompt with full authority.

So here is one of the best/easiest ways to disable the UAC to differant degrees.

First click Start and type “Local Security Policy”

Click top program, you should then see a window like below.

Follow the highlighted paths.

Local Policies > Secrity Options

Now you should have a list of the policy options.

The two which are highlighted will be the ones we will focus on.

These control both how the UAC behaves for Administrators and Standard users.

The following screenshots are of how to completely disable the UAC for Admin users however it is exactly the same process for disabling it for Standard users.

Right click  “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode” > Properties

You should then see a window like below.

Here you can select:

“Prompt for Consent” – This is the default option.

“Prompt for Credentials” – This option asks for a Admin’s username/password to preform admin actions.

“Elevate without prompting” – This will disable the alert completely for Administrators.

Select which option suits you and click Apply > Ok

now you should see it has changed to which ever option you selected

You have now changed your options.

I would advise you leave standard users and if you are a non-super power user admins as the default for scurity reasons.

I hope this helps someone and i will be adding more tweaks for Vista so keep watch!

Dan – Cyber Geek!

Okay, now i was working on a rather long (and illiterate) post where i basically praised it… and said how much i like it…

 Ok here’s my problem. because i have Vista installed on a partiton small drive because i prefer it this way so when i mess up i dont lose everything..

 Well, like i did when i had XP if i got any space issues i Compress the drive…. in the process it throws up those few files which cant be compressed i say ignore and continue.. it finishes i have a bit more preathing space and alls well..