Comments on: CyberNotes: Windows Vista Tips and Tricks

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:32:47 +0000

I have only loaded about one GB of stuff to my computer yet about ten GB of hard drive space is gone. What the hell is going on here ?
Can you explain ? any fixes ?

It’s inevitable that every release of Windows will get bigger and bigger because it continues to get more complex. This isn’t a problem for most computers because they have large hard drives these days, but if you’re suffering from slow performance possibly try using a USB drive as ReadyBoost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

By: richard s

richard s — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:22:36 +0000

Ryan, thanks for sharing
I have owned vista about a month. Have heard the negative comments, but chalked them up to people’s reluctance to change.
I see now what they are talking about. I have only loaded about one GB of stuff to my computer yet about ten GB of hard drive space is gone. What the hell is going on here ?
Can you explain ? any fixes ?
My old machine was a win98, with one third the processor and a quarter the memory yet with the possible exception of speach recognition it did as much as fast (actually faster) it started in less than a minute and shut down in eight seconds.
Have been searching for a little bit now and if I can’t find a fix for this OS I have a hammer, and not afraid to use it, I’ll send the scrap to Bill.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 06:19:12 +0000

I’m glad you have Vista to play around with. We will undoubtedly be sharing the tips as we find them…in fact I have a whole folder worth of ones that I still plan on writing about.

By: Radu Capan

Radu Capan — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 05:51:59 +0000

Now that I have Vista I will finally enjoy you articles about this topic . I hope you will discover more tips to share.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 06:53:53 +0000

Why Vista Boot Speed Quickly but Shut Down Very Slow. Who can help me. (post help please.)

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:42:59 +0000

I’ve only used Macs for a short period of time so it is hard for me to compare the two feature by feature. However, there are a lot of similarities between the Mac OS X and Vista in terms of graphical interface as you mentioned. Most Windows users probably don’t care a ton about how the operating system looks, but I think the newcomers will definitely like it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:29:27 +0000

Hehe… I keep reading these tips and thinking ‘OS X’… all the way through (right down to being able to slow down GUI animations by holding the shift key - same as OS X!).

It’s nice that M$ have finally woken up to the idea that building an OS should be about the end user, not about themselves, and have released this OS X clone in an effort to reconnect, but there’s still some odd things in there that seem unnecessary.

One thing I think is pointless is adding ‘checkboxes’ next to items you select… surely the fact that an item is highlighted anyway should give a big enough visual clue as to the fact it’s been selected. But I suppose it’s horses for courses and all that, whatever floats your boat.

It does however frustrate me that at one level M$ treat it’s customers as thickos who don’t understand the usual conventions of highlighting files to show they’re selected, yet at the same time they can throw up mystic error messages that mean nothing to the majority of people.

Oh well… perhaps the next one, until then I think I’ll stick with what I use (combination of OS X/Linux main work machines and Windows boxes as cheap file serving/storage). For the time being Vista’s minimum hardware requirements make it cheaper to buy a new Mac Mini with OS X bundled for file serving than a new PC and top-of-the-line Vista to get the same level of features from the OS.

Still… 7/10 for artistic merit M$. Could do better, but definitely could have done a lot worse! heh

Anyway, just my opinion from a (multi-OS) user’s perspective, so don’t start a flame war

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 17:51:16 +0000

Part 1: http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2.....reenshots/
Part 2: http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2.....xplorer-7/

By: Darshan

Darshan — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:35:47 +0000

Nice stuff, but if this is part 3, where are parts 1 and 2?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 16:05:05 +0000

I haven’t seen anything on the Internet about it yet, but I looked through the registry and found two keys:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Search\Gather\LowDiskMinimumMBytes

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Search\Gathering Manager\BackOffLowDiskThresholdMB

I think one of those keys must be related to the low disk space warning but I’m not sure which one since I don’t have low disk space. The values look like they are in MB so just put them to something small like 1 so that it would only warn you when 1MB is left.

By: Everton

Everton — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:52:03 +0000

Any idea how to turn off the low disk space warning in Vista? None of the XP methods seem to work