Three great hidden Windows Vista tips you may not know about

There are a lot of great tips, tricks and ways to get Windows Vista to run exactly the way you want it to. Some of these are easy to find; however some are hidden away so well that you may not know they even exist. The following tips may be hard to find, but they are easy to carry out and can improve the way you work with Windows Vista.

How to open the command prompt from anywhere in Windows Explorer

You can open up the command prompt from any location using Windows Explorer. On the menu located on the left-hand side of the Windows Explorer window hold down Shift and right-click on the folder you want the command prompt to open up at. Select Open Command Window Here and the command prompt will open.

Generate a system health report to quickly identify problems with your PC

If you want to make sure that your PC is working correctly, you can use the tools included with Windows Vista to give you an easy to understand overview of your computer’s ‘health’ – and any problems, such as lack of space on your hard drive or out-of-date drivers, will be helpfully highlighted.

To create a report open up the Start menu and go to Control Panel > System & Maintenance > Performance Information and Tools. Click on Advanced tools on the left-hand side of the window and select Generate a system health report.

Stop the UAC from blacking out your desktop

When you receive certain messages from the UAC (User Account Control) your desktop becomes ‘blacked out’, which is a feature called Secure Desktop. Some people find this annoying, especially users with less powerful machines where the ‘blacking out’ of the desktop can take a few seconds to complete, slowing them down. Although this is a helpful security feature of Windows Vista, which prevents malicious programs from sending information after the UAC has displayed a message; you may still want to remove this.
 

In the Business, Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows Vista open the Start menu and type in gpedit.msc into the search box, and press Enter.

On the left-hand menu click to expand Computer Configuration and navigate to Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options. In the policies window on the right scroll down to the User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation policy and double-click it. Change the option to Disabled and then click OK.

To accomplish this in Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium editions, you will need to edit the registry. Please be warned that incorrectly editing your registry can damage your computer, so proceed with caution.

Click on the Start menu, type in Regedit.exe and press Enter. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and locate the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System registry key. Double-click ProptOnSecureDesktop, change its value to 0 and then click OK.