Windows Vista Secrets Part Two

Digital Studio | Guides | 21/04/2009 09:56am
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Save time with previews

The preview pane in Windows Explorer does more than show you a pretty picture of a file. It enables you to see the contents of the file, too – so if it’s a photo you can see the picture, if it’s an Excel spreadsheet or Word document you can read its contents, and if it’s a video you can watch it. To display the preview pane, click Organize > Layout > Preview Pane. You can resize it by dragging its left-hand edge with the mouse to make it bigger or smaller.

Turn off thumbnails

If you find thumbnails slow down your PC, turn them off. Go to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Folder Options and select the View tab. Now, select Always Show Icons, Never Thumbnails. You can use this tab to turn off the Preview Pane, too.

Tweak your power plans

If you’re using a laptop, Windows Vista knows when it’s plugged in and when it’s running on the battery, and it adjusts the system performance accordingly. The defaults are pretty good, but you can tweak them to make them even better, squeezing even more minutes from your battery or just reducing your PC’s energy use. To change your energy settings, go into the Control Panel and choose Hardware and Sound > Power Options, select the plan you want to change and click Change Plan Settings.

You can also use these settings to change how your PC behaves when you press the power button or close the laptop lid, and you can get Windows Vista to ask for a password when your PC is woken from sleep mode. Top tip for laptop users: if you change the power plan so that Windows Vista cuts the display brightness to 50% when you’re running on battery, that alone can give you around 20 more minutes of battery life.

Shortcuts to working faster

Launch programs and scale icons at top speed

1 QUICKER LAUNCH The Quick Launch bar is a handy place to put applications you use all the time, but you don’t need to use the mouse to launch them. Just hold down the Windows key and hit the number keys. Win + 1 launches the first application in your Quick Launch bar, Win + 2 the second, and so on.

2 ENLARGE THE BAR You don’t need the icons in the Quick Launch bar to be visible when you’re using keyboard shortcuts, but if you don’t have a good memory, it’s a good idea to expand the Quick Launch bar so you can see the order in which the icons appear.

3 SCALE ICONS One of our favourite things about Windows Explorer is that you can view icons in sizes ranging from tiny to absolutely massive, but there’s a faster way to resize them than by using the Views menu. Simply hold down Ctrl and use your mouse wheel to change the icon size.

Display RAW images

Got a fancy digital SLR? Wish you could view RAW files in the Windows Photo Gallery? Click File > Update and you can download the necessary converters for the RAW files already on your PC – or just download the converter for your camera from www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/codecs.aspx.

Tame the pop-ups

If you’re using your laptop to deliver a presentation (and you’re not running Home Basic), you don’t need to waggle the mouse to stop the screensaver kicking in or worry about Security Center pop-ups distracting your audience. The Windows Vista presentation settings (Control Panel > Mobile PC > Windows Mobility Center > Presentations) can disable such interruptions when connected to a projector or external monitor.

Enable Parental Controls

Windows Vista includes some excellent features to stop the kids seeing things they shouldn’t or going glassy-eyed in front of a screen, but many people don’t know they’re there. The best way to use them is to create a separate account for each family member, log in as the administrator and go to the Control Panel and choose User Accounts and Family Safety. Here, you can set options for each person, so you can block or allow programs, filter the websites they use, or even prevent the PC from being used at specific times.

Part One? Part Two?Part Three

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 9:56 am and is filed under Guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.