Well yesterday, my son’s old CRT monitor finally decided to quit working. We don’t have the cash at the moment to run out and get a new monitor, so my husband was kind enough to give him his monitor. It was decided that my hubby could use the laptop for what he does. So I formatted it, then installed & Setup Kubuntu for him. He’s pretty happy with it. That left us with one computer that had no monitor, so I decided to bring it into the living room and make good use of it.

This computer is a Gateway GM5478, it originally came with windows vista and has always had a few bugs that made it not work well with Linux, also dual screen doesn’t scale in linux. The one other issue that kept me from making it a mythbox is that the t.v. tuner(an AVerMedia M791) that came with the system is not supported by linux. So knowing all that I decided to put Vista back on it for our purposes.  First off we moved both the computer & monitor into the living room and hooked everything up including the t.v. I needed the monitor to run the install. I proceeded to wipe the Kubuntu install off the computer and format the drive to NTFS as Kubuntu Uses EXT4, after that I proceeded to install Windows Vista. Once it installed, and I had all the drivers installed and updates completed, I was able to remove the monitor completly from the setup.

The System has a 1gb Nvidia 9400GT video card. Our t.v. is an older 32 inch sylvania, so it doesn’t have HDMI inputs on it, forcing us to use an svideo cable. In order to make the font’s readable on the t.v. screen, I had to enable Large fonts (120 DPI), I also set the resolution at 800×600 I could have gone smaller but doing so means some windows scale off the screen making it impossible to click buttons like “OK” or “Cancel”.  I should mention that I also had to go into the display settings and make the t.v. my default monitor, then I disabled the actual monitor. After that I was able to unplug the monitor all together.

Windows vista comes with Windows Media center, we also have an windows media center remote we can use with it. But in order to make this system really workable I needed a way to be able to launch Boxee and Hulu Desktop with the remote. For that I was able to download Media Center Studio, its a free application that let’s you customize Media centers menu strips as well as letting you use and/or create themes for it. The website for Media Center Studio doesn’t mention however that in order to use the program you need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 & Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 installed on your system to get the program running, luckily I was able to figure it out after a bit of googling. After getting the program running I was able to add a link for both Boxee and Hulu Desktop to the menu in my media center. Now if I’m on the couch and want to watch the latest episode of House on hulu, I just push the green button on my remote that launches media center, then select hulu from the menu and media center will minimize to the background and hulu will launch. When I’m done, I use my remote to exit hulu and media center pops back up. It works the same for Boxee, so I was able to add all my local videos, music, and pictures to boxee and control those sitting in comfort on my couch, or sprawled out on the living room floor. We hooked the cable up to the t.v. tuner of course so we could watch and record t.v., I also installed the netflix media center plugin, and now I can watch my netflix instant queue movies and edit my dvd queue right from media center.

We do have a mouse and keyboard hooked up the computer, for now we’re just using a logitech g15, mostly because of the back lighting, though We would like to get a wireless setup going. Eventually we do plan on replacing the old sylvania with a nice plasma set, though that could be a while.

For now the setup is working great, it’s nice to have such a wide selection of media to watch on our t.v. and to be able to control it all from the comfort of our living room.

For those users who purchased Windows Vista Basic, you’ll notice your missing two of the interfaces available in the other versions of vista. Flip 3D and the Aero Interface. On systems whose graphics capabilities are able to handle such things you may be wondering if there is a way to get these effects without paying the extra cash to upgrade to a different vista version. Good News there is! To get that flip 3D effect users have serveral options available to them.

For $20.00 Top Desk offers the Flip 3D effect as well as the Expose effect found in the mac systems. Better News yet there is also a free utility available to those of you on a tight budget called Shock Aero 3D and for xp users only you may wish to give WinFlip a try.

The following registry hack allows Vista Basic Users to enable Aero on their system (NOTE:BE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE PROCEEDING!)

Click Start and type Regedit in the search bar, open the registry editor and navigate to:

net start uxsms

Reboot Your System to see the changes

There is also a program called TrueTransparency that changes the windows border adding png support and so true transparency.

Another option available to users is Stardocks Windowblinds, there are many skins for it which use the transparency effect. Windowblinds however is shareware.

Windows Flip 3D and Windows Flip is a new way to switch and jump between opened windows in 3D dimensional or informative view, minimizing the error while selecting target window. Beside, the Flip 3D mode is also a stunning visual view. To activate or trigger Windows Flip 3D or Windows Flip mode, other than using Window Switcher button in Quick Launch bar or pressing “Win+Tab” keyboard shortcut, it’s also possible to add a Windows Flip 3D option to right click contextual menu using trick below.

• Run Registry Editor (RegEdit.exe), and then navigate to the following registry branch: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\ContextMenuHandlers
• Right click on ContextMenuHandlers registry key, and select New, then click on Key.
• Name the new registry key as Window Switcher.
• Highlight the new “Window Switcher” key, then double click on (Default) value name in the right pane.
• Set the value data for the “(Default)” as {3080F90E-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}
• Click “OK” and exit Registry Editor.

From now on, whenever users right click on desktop, a new menu item
“Window Switcher” will be shown, directly bring users to Windows Flip
3D or illustrated with thumbnails task switching (if Aero is not
enabled) when clicked.

If you reinstalled vista only to find half your files were backed up into a folder on your C drive called “windows.old” you can easily delete it using the following steps.

1. Click Start
2. In the search box type disk clean and hit enter to open the Disk Cleanup tool
3. Choose “Files from all users on this computer” and choose the drive you want to clean
4. After it lists what is available to “clean”, scroll down and select Windows.old from the list of choices. Then delete as desired!

Most users who installed 64 bit copies of vista than decided it wasn’t for them for one reason or another found that they had product key problems once they wanted to re-install vista 32 bit using thier upgrade disk. Most would have to install windows Xp then run the upgrade again, but here’s a nice work-around to that problem.

Run your vista 32 bit install and skip the part where it asks for a product key, DON’T EVEN TRY TO ENTER A KEY you’ll just get errors. Once you boot up into Vista for the first time, just insert the CD/DVD again and then choose to “upgrade” to the same exact version. You don’t even have to let the software know that XP was ever installed. Using this process this could have been the first time you used Windows and you can use the upgrade option.

Problem solved you now are back to Vista 32 bit and never even had to re-install XP.

There is a nice feature on windows vista that allows you to see a thumbnail of the minimized windows in your taskbar. It’s one of the things I love about vista. The live window taskbar hover preview can even support playing or streaming video or movie in animated preview. However, the thumbnail preview is kind of small, hardly allow users to see anything meaning, not to mention able to view movie in ‘thumbnail mirror’ while doing other tasks simultaneously. So you may want to adjust the settings other than completly disabling it. There is a handy little program called Vista Thumbnail Sizer that let’s you adjust the size of the thumbnail as well as the fade effect on it. You can get it here . However be aware at this time it only supports windows vista 32 bit.

There are two new
power buttons on the Windows Vista start menu that behave differently
than in previous versions of Windows. The main button, that looks like
a power button actually puts your computer to sleep, not really turning
it completely off. The other button locks your computer. I personally
do not like putting my computer to sleep. I would rather turn it off
completely to save some power and save some money on my electric bill
when I am sleeping.

Follow the steps below to customize these button to work how you want them to work:

1. Click on the Start Menu and type in Power Options and hit Enter.
2. Click on Choose what power buttons do on the side menu.
3. Configure the buttons.
4. Hit Save Changes.

One of the most commonly asked questions about vista is “How the hell do I disable the User account control On vista?!?!” You would be surprised at how easy it is do do this. I’ll outline the process below.

1. Logon to your windows vista desktop (a given)

2. Open your start menu and select Control Panel

3. Select User Accounts and Family Safety

4. Select User Accounts

5. Click Turn User Account Control On Or Off

6. Uncheck “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer”

7. Click OK

8. You’ll now be prompted to reboot your computer so that the changes can take affect.

Thats pretty much it. Very easy to remedy in about 15 seconds. Now you’ll no longer have that annoying permissions dialogue popping up all the time. This doesn’t disable windows defender either which will still be running.

I hope this helps!