Top 12 Vista Tweaks (part 1)

We've filtered and sorted through the hundreds of Vista hints and tweaks to find the ones that we think the most readers will find useful. While Vista still feels new, these hints and tweaks might help you settle into your OS.

Introduction
So you've installed Vista, perhaps against your better judgment, and now you’re wondering what you can do to spruce it up a bit. We’re right there with you, and have poured over the Web looking for the coolest, most-useful tweaks we could find. We searched high and low, and completed this list of tweaks so that you did not have to. We have personally tested all of these tweaks and employ most of them on our own systems.
Our sources for this article include this monster thread on our very own forums and Tweakvista.com.

Tweaks 1-6

Tip 1: Customize the size of desktop and file icons.
For some time, it has been possible to adjust font size in office documents and Web browsers simply by holding down the CTRL key while rolling your mouse wheel up and down. In Vista, the same action lets you tweak the size of your desktop icons. Just click on an empty area of the desktop, hold down CTRL, and spin your mouse wheel until the icons are the size you want. You can also adjust the size of your file or folder icons in Windows Explorer by doing the same thing. This is extremely handy for viewing thumbnails of images.

Tip 2: Increase SATA drive performance.
This tip “enhances” drive performance by allowing the drive in question to perform more write caching to system memory. The danger is if your system loses power and you do not have a backup power source (UPS), whatever data is cached to system memory will be lost. If you’re the adventurous type and want a bit more responsiveness out of your system, click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, click the Device Manager, open up the Disk drives tree, right-click a drive, and select Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check “Enable Advanced Performance.” Click OK.

Tip 3: More widescreen Vista wallpapers.
When Microsoft went shopping for panoramic, widescreen wallpapers for Vista, it tapped Hamad Darwish to shoot some photos. Some of his photos made it into the initial shipping version of Vista, but many did not. Now Darwish is offering all of them for download, absolutely free. Some of them are absolutely remarkable, in our opinion, so go ahead and check them out.

Tip 4: Speed up Flip3D.
This tip will be useful for notebook owners or anyone whose PC is packing less than stellar graphics processing power. The Flip3D animation can bog down weaker graphics cards if it has to flip a lot of windows, so this is a tweak that lets you set the number of windows that will be rendered in 3D at one time.
• Click on the Start Button, type regedit in the Search bar, and press Enter.
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, and DWM.
• Create a new DWORD and call it Max3DWindows.
• Set the value of this to something between four and nine (“4” and “9”) depending on the performance of your card (a higher number requires more video card power). You should then feel free to experiment to find the best value for your computer. Restart your PC to finalize the change.

Tip 5: Two must-have Sidebar Gadgets.
At first blush, we thought the Windows Sidebar was rather useless. The default Gadgets were not useful (who wants an analog clock when you have a clock on the Taskbar?), and it seemed like a poor rip-off of Yahoo Widgets. However, we’ve now come across some rather useful Gadgets at both of these Microsoft websites.
The first is Multi-Meter, which is the first Gadget we’ve ever seen that can measure CPU activity for multiple cores. You can download it here.
Another Gadget we’re quite fond of is DriveInfo, as it displays the free space on multiple volumes. Since we have several hard drives on our home machines, we love this Gadget. It also allows you to access the drives by simply double-clicking them in the Gadget. Download it here.

Tip 6: Discover what applications are linked to certain processes.
The Processes tab of the Windows XP Task Manager was a confusing, barren wasteland of cryptically-named processes. If you wanted to find out which application was responsible for a certain process, all you could do was to copy down the name of the executable, and then search for it in Windows to locate it or Google it. This was an annoying process. Thankfully, Microsoft has fixed this in Vista by adding an “open file location” option when you right-click any process. Doing so opens the folder the process is running from, which can help you figure out if a certain process can be turned off or not.

You can also click “View” at the top of the Task Manager and click Select Columns to select which columns to display.

to be continue....