PCTips Box

Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) is the new operating system’s most universally reviled feature. Sure, it helps protect you, but it also annoys you to no end.

If UAC drives you around the bend, you can turn it off. There are several ways to do it. One way is to choose Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > User Accounts, then click Turn User Account Control on or off.

Alternately, you can run the System Configuration Utility (a.k.a. msconfig) by typing msconfig at the command line or search box. When the tool runs, click the Tools tab and scroll down until you see Disable UAC. Highlight it and click the Launch button, then reboot. To turn it back on again, follow the same steps and choose Enable UAC. (more…)

When a users enters text in the search box on the start panel Windows automatically searches the file index as well. The file index includes all of the searchable files on your hard drive and can be quite large. One way to speed up searching through your start menu applications is to narrow the scope of the search so that it does not include hard drive files.

Prevent Start Menu Searches from searching the File index: (more…)

If you’ve ever run the Windows XP’s Disk Cleanup utility, you probably discovered that your temporary files occupy a significant amount of space. You might select the Temporary Files check box in order to allow the Disk Cleanup utility to delete the files in the Temp folder, but the Disk Cleanup utility will not remove all of the files. The reason for this oddity is that the configuration for the Disk Cleanup utility does not allow deletion of files accessed in the last seven days.

By altering the LastAccess value in the registry, you can configure the Disk Cleanup utility to delete all the files in the Temp folder regardless of the last accessed date. Here’s how: (more…)

If you set a computer for automatic logon, anyone who can physically gain access to the computer can also gain access to everything that is on the computer, including any network or networks that the computer is connected to. Additionally, if you turn on automatic logon, the password is stored in the registry in plain text. The specific registry key that stores this value is remotely readable by the Authenticated Users group. Therefore, only use this setting if the computer is physically secured and if you make sure that users who you do not trust cannot remotely see the registry.

You can use Registry Editor to add your log on information. To do this, follow these steps: (more…)

On Windows Vista when you map a drive under your admin account you will find that your mapped drive is not available after you switch to your full token via a RunAs or Consent dialog. This is by design because there are actually two tokens in play here. What happens is the LSA recognized that you are admin at logon and creates two logons. The first with a “filtered” token or non-admin which is used to render your desktop and the other containing your full token to be available after consent dialogs.

Because there are two separate logons there are separate logon ID’s. When network shares are mapped they are linked to the current logon session for the current process token. (more…)

Microsoft generally makes newer programs backward-compatible with their older versions, so they can at least read the old program’s files. But in Windows XP SP2, the file converters for old versions of WordPad files aren’t enabled by default. If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed, WordPad is the default application for opening DOC and RTF files—and it can’t handle the old ones. With Office installed, Microsoft Word takes over, and it will successfully open old DOC and RTF files. But even then, WordPad remains the default application for files with the WordPad-specific WRI extension. (more…)

When you connect to another computer with Windows XP, it checks for any Scheduled tasks on that computer - a fairly useless task, but one that can add up to 30 seconds of waiting on the other end - not good! Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to disable this process. (more…)

ReadyBoost is a disk caching system introduced in Windows Vista that relies on flash memory to boost system performance. At the moment only certain flash drives are compatible with Readyboost, but gHacks have found a way so that any USB drive can be used with ReadyBoost. (more…)