|
1029usr078198
Forum Admin
USA
333 Posts |
 Posted - December 23 2008 : 07:49:32
|
Listen to Part 1 now. Listen to Part 2 now. or Download the archive of Part 1. Download the archive of Part 2.
Note The order of the items listed below will not match the order they were broadcast in. This is just the order in which I wrote the notes before recording.
Well, today’s Boxing Day or Kwanzaa, depending on which one you want to celebrate, but yesterday was Christmas, and many of you may have new computers to show for it. These probably had Windows Vista on them. Besides, this time next month, we’ll be lamenting the loss of Windows XP on new systems. So we thought we’d do a special show or two entitled, “10 things you can do with Vista Home Premium you probably didn’t know”. We chose this edition of Vista because it is the one you most likely have if you just got a new computer, but the stuff we’ll talk about, you can also do in Vista Ultimate.
Only 30% of computers with XP Media Center Edition included TV Tuners. Now, it had the ability to record TV if you had a tuner and that’s great, but if you have Vista Home Premium and you don’t have a TV Tuner card, I’ve got two words: GET ONE.
Edit Recorded TV – Windows XP’s version of Media Player supports playing recorded shows; but the version of Windows MovieMaker included in XP doesn’t support editing them.
Eddie: So what?
David: If you can edit the recordings afterward, you can take out the commercials before you make a DVD of the result.
Set Parental Controls – If you set up standard user accounts for the kids to use, you can set limits that help you manage what the kids can do on the computer. These controls help parents determine the allowable games they can play, which programs they can use, and which websites they can visit—and when. Time restrictions on computer use can also be set up and will be enforced, even if you aren’t there. Just be sure you don’t give them your password.
Extend or Shrink Disk Volumes – For the first time, Windows natively allows you to resize a disk partition without losing the files it contains. Several utility programs are able to do this with other versions of Windows. One I’ve used has been Partition Magic. Now, because Partition Magic is a single-purpose tool, it can do the job better than Windows, but that’s normal. If you have a very large hard drive, the maker of your computer may have divided it into several partitions, two is fairly common, and each of these partitions has its own drive letter, usually C and D. Under the right circumstances, you can delete the D partition, and extend C into the now empty space. I know the feature exists, but haven’t played around with it enough to know what “the right circumstances” means.
Use Windows Flip & Flip 3D – If you’re much of a power user, you may already know about using the Alt+Tab keys to let you cycle between your open windows. In previous versions of Windows, this only showed the icon for the program. With Vista, the window itself shows up. That’s cool, and called Windows Flip, but if you use the Windows Logo key instead of the Alt key, and do a Win+Tab, instead of a list, each window will rotate about 40 degrees or so, so that you can see each window from its left side. That’s called Flip 3D. Releasing the keys brings that window to the top. Note that this feature only works when Vista’s Aero interface is enabled.
Author Your Own DVDs – By DVD Authoring, I mean creating menus for DVDs of your own creation. So instead of just a video of your vacation, you can burn a DVD with your own “Special Features” section, for instance.
Create Panoramic Photos – First, take several pictures and make sure they overlap a little bit. Using Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can select those photos, and the Gallery will use the overlap to stitch the photos together into a seamless panorama. Here’s a plus: because this is a download from http://photogallery.live.com, you can also do this one on XP.
Tag Your Photos – You can do this one in the Live Photo gallery, but also in the photo gallery applet included within Vista. Tags are simple keywords that can be used to describe your pictures. For instance, you might tag all your vacation photos with the keyword “vacation”. You could tag family portraits as “family portraits” or Christmas pictures as “Christmas”. I’d recommend also adding the tag “2008” to those, because you can use multiple tags to describe each photo and search on them later.
Talk to Your Computer – Microsoft has been working on speech recognition for years, because I’ve been playing with it for a long time. They even included speech recognition capabilities in Office 2003, but they took it out in Office 2007 because they moved the recognition to Windows. You’ll need a microphone to make this work, but the system trains easily enough and you can dictate as well as give commands. Now this isn’t Star Trek, but it’s not bad.
Use the Snipper to Take Pictures of Your Screen – Windows lets you put a copy of the whole screen on your clipboard by pressing the Print Screen button. If you use an Alt+Print Screen, you’ll only get the active window. You can paste that into any program that can accept pictures, like Paint. I’ve used these techniques for years for documenting errors, program steps, or even settings in certain windows. But with the Snipping Tool, you draw a rectangle around an area of the screen and it’s instantly copied into the snipper. You can then annotate by highlighter or pen, and then save the result in several forms or email it to whomever you choose.
Improved Task Manager – For those who like to look “under the hood” the humble Task Manager has a new services tab in addition to the networking tab XP added. A description column has been added to the processes tab, and in the performance tab, a new button called Resource Monitor lets you get more information than you ever wanted to know about the stuff running on your computer. This should prove great for finding malware.
Use Shadow Copies – This one’s a bonus you can only do with the Business or Ultimate editions of Vista. Shadow copies are a feature you can use on Windows XP under certain circumstances. They’ve been enhanced in Windows Vista to be useful even without a Windows Server around. Eddie: What are they? David: Shadow copies enable you to see previous versions of files or folders. |
|
12/26/2008 & 1/2/2009 -10+ Cool things about Vista
