Blogging on Realtime Vista will be going on hiatus. We hope that the site has offered a great number of tips and solutions to help users get better acquainted with Microsoft's Windows Vista. Though comments and blogging will discontinue, we do hope that this site continues to be a source of instruction for all involved with using Vista.

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Posted by admin | Permalink | |

You probably know about the QuickLaunch toolbar for the taskbar (the bar that starts with the "start orb" and unsually ends with the time) at the bottom of your screen. There are other toolbars at your disposal as well. One I had not noticed before is the iTunes toolbar (of course you need iTunes installed to see this):

You can select it to be shown, but the application does not display the iTunes toolbar unless you have iTunes running and minmized. When minimized, instead of seeing it as a normal minimized application, this toolbar is activated instead which lets you do very basic operations in controlling the player as well as the ability to restore the full iTunes application to view.

You may be more familiar with the Windows Media player toolbar as they have offered this feature of a while now. It works in the same way (appears when running and minimized) but it offers quite a bit more than the track skipping, pausing and volume provided by iTunes. You can also see a mini-visualization and track information (plus it reflects your chose theme/skin).

There is also an "Address" toolbar that gives you a simple web browser address bar where you can quickly enter a web address. However, this is of fairly limited value today as you can also enter a URL in the search box in the start menu in the same way (I guess it saves you one click, and that is something).

Others include links, desktop and (again if supported) and a Tablet PC Input Panel. Right click your taskbar and select "Toolbars" to have a look at what options are there for you.

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

If you have an interactive user program that needs admin permissions to run, it will not do so on startup. Instead, an icon appears in the notification area (system tray) which lets you see (and optionally start) such programs manually where you can then acknowledge the UAC prompt required to kick it off.

View image

It is a bit of a pain, but the alternative would be to present you with a UAC prompt every time you logged into the computer, and that would be much more painful. Particularly as so many people seem to hate this feature already.

It could be the program does not really need admin permissions to run, but is requiring it as a matter of sloppy programming. Okay that could be harsh, it was not such a big deal to “attempt” an action as administrator before Vista. The point being, if you have an application doing this to you, see the vendor’s website for updates as there are things that can be done programmatically to avoid this situation and with any luck the vendor has released a “more” Vista compatible release that avoids this situation.

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

Yet another of the helpful improvements brought to us by Vista is a “Favorite Links” area in the File explorer (and most file browse dialogs). By default, you’ll see special folders like “Documents” and “Pictures” but you can drag any folder here to add a shortcut of your own.
I use this feature regularly to access locations I would otherwise have to navigate too often. Among the default items listed here is also “Recently Changed” and “Searches” two very helpful items if you are not creating links of your own as I suggested. Recently changed is essentially a search for recently changed items (which include documents and not just folders as you might desire here).

If you don’t see your favorite links listed, click Organize > Layout > Navigation Pane to expose it along with a folder browser. You can resize the area as you wish and delete any items you don’t care about. These are simply stored as hyperlinks in your profile’s special folder entitled “Links”. (C:\Users\\Links).

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

I must have got an MP3 file in my temp folder; that is my best guess how it happened. I wanted to sort the files by date and found that the folder was being treated as a media folder. None of these files have "Artists", "Album" or "Genre" meta data! I right-clicked on the columns to modify what columns exist, but again all were related to media files (no date created).

Right click in the white-space (not on a column or file) and choose "Customize This Folder…" (or choose properties for the folder and navigate to the "Customize" tab).

At the top you'll see "What kind of folder do you want?" along with the option "Use this folder type as a template". In my case "Music Details" was mistakenly the option selected. There are also choices for "All Items", "Documents", "Pictures and Videos", and "Music Icons". These options represent selections of not only sets of columns you can view by default but it also affects the toolbar at the top: if you choose "Pictures and Videos" you'll see "Slide Show" appear as an option. if you choose "Music Icons" you'll see "Burn" (actually you get "Burn" for a lot of the options).

In my case, choosing "Documents" or "All Items" got me back to a "normal" folder where I could again sort the files by date as I had wanted.

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

Some people hate change and I've had more than one person write about how they don't like the new layout of Internet Explorer 7. So here are some quick tips how you can make it work more like the crappy old IE 6…

1) From the IE7 main menu at the top left under the search box, click "Tools" and then "Internet Options"

2) On the "General" tab, click the "Settings" button under "Tabs". Deselect "Enable Tabbed Browsing" and press "OK"

3) Close IE and start it up again.

4) Right click on the toolbar (where the icons are at the top of the window) and check "Menu Bar"

5) If you have other toolbars like, the Google toolbar and want to move them around, you'll need to unlock the Toolbars by right-clicking on them and deselecting "Lock the Toolbars". Then you can drag the toolbars and resize them as you wish.

* While you can customize the search box to make it use other providers, you cannot remove it.
* You'd probably prefer the menu bar on the top of the page, but it cannot be moved above the address bar.
* You can customize the icons and tools in the IE toolbar, but you cannot remove it entirely or add new commands that are not listed. Right-click and choose "Customize Command Bar" to see what options you have available.

So, that gets you closer to IE6 cosmetically, but I really feel that IE7 is a big move forward from IE6 and it is worth getting used to. Of course, if you hate change you won't be looking to move to FireFox, but I do recommend giving it a look!

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

I really didn't think there was much to this application, but I gave it a good work-out when I spliced together a bunch of slow-motion videos I took of my Palm Treo phone getting blown up. The phone had been failing on me for some time and I threatened to do it in many times. Just about the time I finally got my iPhone, the video camera I'd been waiting for also finally came out-- the MemoryStick-only HD video camera from Sony (HDR-CX7), which features a nice 240 frames per second slow motion feature of which I just had to take advantage.

At any rate, the software that came with it lets me archive and play videos, but little else. There is a feature to open the video in an external program, so before running off and buying more software I decided to give Windows Movie Maker in Vista a go. I expected very little and was very pleasantly surprised-- in fact I don't think I'll be buying a commercial replacement for it at all.

 
Continue reading Windows Movie Maker: Hands On...

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

To quickly see the edition, version and build of Windows Vista running on your system, simply run the command C:\Windows\system32\winver.exe. It will also provide you the "registered to" name and company as entered during installation as well as the amount of physical memory available to Windows.

Alternatively, you can hit the Windows button, type "winver" and hit enter. This operation takes the file "winver" and runs it from the search box that appears in the start menu. A time saving tip if you don't know already-- you can hit the Windows Key and just start typing away, hit enter to run the top search result returned or to run the command as you could with the "Run" dialog (Win-R).

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |

I've complained about Vista's Data Execution Protection (DEP) feature before, but I wanted to live with it for the benefits it does bring to the table. That is until I got my iPhone. Actually, just having installed the latest iTunes (7.3.0.54) before I had the phone caused me problems if I even selected the iPhone tab from the preferences menu. Fingers crossed, I attached my iPhone and the problems got worse-- much worse. Repeated crashes occurred from AppleMobileDeviceHelper.exe and Outlook forced me to disable the add-in before it would run. I excluded AppleMobileDeviceHelper.exe from being monitored by Data Execution Prevention and that got me further but then DEP started shutting down other Apple components like MDCrashReportTool.exe and YahooSync.exe (even something called "Test 1 module". I added these and everything else stored in the "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support" folder to the list of applications to be excluded from DEP. That should do it! Or perhaps make things even worse-- yes much worse. Now explorer was crashing on me constantly. I could not even open the control panel to troubleshoot further without explorer crashing!

Finally, I disabled DEP entirely from the command line and rebooted. Since then everything has been fine.

Lesson: iTunes doesn't like DEP on Vista

Obviously not everyone is having this problem, but I remain surprised it was not encountered as an issue during Apple's own testing. Hopefully someone as frustrated as I was can be saved the pain of my entire experience with this tip!

 
Continue reading iTunes and iPhone Kill Vista...

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | Comments (8) |

If you browse the web a lot, you are probably very happy for the use of tabs in your browser. But if you are sick of launching your browser, getting your homepage loaded and then entering the address you want to visit in order to hit a desired address, there a couple of other options:

1) Hit the start key and "start" typing. The search field that get focus by default will take your web address and open it in your default browser.

2) Right click on the taskbar and choose properties. On the toolbars tab you'll find "Address" as an option. Click that and a web browser address bar appears in the taskbar where you can type the address you wish without even having to hit that Windows key! If you do this, you'll probably want to click and drag on the task bar to resize it to at least double height.

3) Hit Win+R for the old "Run" dialog, this will take your address and open it just as the start menu's search field will do, but I prefer the former.

4, 5, 6, 7... Shortcuts, scripts, sidebar widgets-- what ideas do you have to share?

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Posted by Bob Kelly | Permalink | |