Top 20 Windows Vista fixes

If you have a Business edition of Vista or Vista Ultimate edition, disabling the Secure Desktop is easy.

Simply run ‘secpol.msc’ from the Start menu or a command prompt and navigate to Local Policies, then Security Options.

Scroll down to ‘User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation’, double-click and select ‘Disabled’.

If you have the Home edition, you’ll have to edit the Registry directly, so take the usual precaution of backing up your system, then open regedit and browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.

Create a new ‘DWORD (32-bit) value’ by right-clicking on the right-hand pane. Give it the name ‘PromptOnSecureDesktop’ and set its value to 0.

3. The Aero slowdown
Vista’s Aero Glass interface looks great, but it requires some real graphics horsepower to run properly. If your system is borderline when it comes to meeting hardware requirements, you may find it’s not able to run the interface as fast as you’d like.

The obvious option is to disable Aero and swap to Windows Vista Basic mode. The control to do this is a little hidden: open the Control Panel and go to Personalization, then Window Color and Appearance. Select ‘Open classic appearance properties for more color options’ at the bottom, then choose Windows Vista Basic.

This will disable the transparent desktop effects and features such as Flip 3D and live thumbnail previews. If you want to keep the latter options, keep Aero running, but disable the transparency effect by going to the Window Color and Appearance window and unchecking ‘Enable Transparency’.

You can also perform the same function from the command line by typing

Rundll32 dwmApi #104

to disable the effect and

Rundll32 dwmApi #102

to re-enable it. These commands can be made into desktop shortcuts, or added to the Windows context menu – see Tip 8 below.

4. Indexing slows down your PC
Many of Vista’s new features are designed to make your life easier, to make you more productive and to speed up the way you interact with your PC. Unfortunately, many require a jolly fast PC if they’re to work well.

Vista’s enhanced indexing service is a prime example of such a feature. Integrated into just about every Explorer window, it lets you type a few letters of whatever you’re looking for and the results are displayed almost instantaneously.

If your PC is slow, it won’t be instantaneous. All that indexing in the background is going to make everything else slower, too. If this is happening to you, turn it off. To do that, open the Control Panel and select Indexing Options. Select Modify and then ‘Show all locations’.

From here you can enable or disable indexing for any selected locations. If you have any hard drives checked, unchecking them will give you a general performan ce boost at the expense of slower searches. We would recommend keeping indexing turned on for the Start Menu, so you’ll be able to locate programs quickly with only a negligible impact on performance.