NIFTY and NON-NIFTY things about Windows Vista (*NOT* a Vista-bashing thread)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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First rule of NIFTY/NON-NIFTY thread: if you have a negative point to make, it must be counterbalanced with a positive one! I don’t want this thread to devolve into yet another thread about Vista sucking.
NIFTY: I just discovered that if you hold down CTRL+V it will paste over and over really fast. In the past if I wanted to paste a whole bunch of text (such as “I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!”) I’d generally hit CTRL+V several times in a row, then highlight the new, larger chunk of text, paste that several times, etc. Now I can just hold it down and it zooms along! If XP did this I am not aware of it–I used XP for years and I think I’d have noticed, but there is a chance I didn’t. In which case, my bad and ignore me :wink: blush

NON-NIFTY: I haven’t pinned it down yet but there is some key combination that I can hold down (that I seem to do regularly in the course of using the computer) that will transfer focus to the gadget bar thing over on the right side of the screen. (Normally that becomes the focus if you mouse over it). This happens when I’m typing and pause for a moment, usually with my finger on a key. I had thought it was SHIFT but now that I am testing it I can’t make it do it. Anyway it frustrates me because I’ll continue to type after my pause but the cursor will no longer be in the window I’m typing in, and I have to click back into it and re-type whatever I was typing.

NIFTY: Mousing over the browser window items* on the taskbar pops up a little thumbnail of the page, rather than just the title. This is awesome because a lot of times I remember what the page looked like, but not so much the title. Or the title will be too generic.

NON-NIFTY: It seems to like to decide what window will be in front, and when. For example, if I am loading a web page, and open another page* while the old one is loading… then when the first one loads, ta-da!!! it has to pop to the front. Same goes for files opening, downloads completing, etc. XP had this behavior as well, but Vista does it more/worse. For me, I want to decide when to look at something, and if I have something going as a background task, I want it to stay in the background until I’m ready to look at it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ll have something pop up in the background and start automatically installing an update patch to software, and I’ll be typing an email, and the updater will get to a window where it needs to ask a question, and I hit a key that corresponds to one of the choices because I’m, you know, typing --probably y for yes n for no, but I’m not sure, as the screen goes away almost before I’ve registered that it was ever there. So lots of the time I have no idea what it was even asking, let alone what I answered.

NIFTY: I like the search feature better for the most part.

NON-NIFTY: It can be frustrating when it decides to display different information based on what is in a folder. For example, if it is a folder full of images, I get a bunch of sortable columns for stuff like “date taken” and “rating” but not one for “file type” which I’m far more likely to use. I have to manually redo the settings for the folder if I want to see that stuff. (I have tried to set overall defaults for folder settings, but have so far been unable to do so in a way that actually does make all folders behave in my chosen way. If you know the secret, do tell.)

*For reasons too long to go into, I prefer to use new windows vs new tabs about 80% of the time.

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Er, yes, XP does indeed do this. I think it’s been this way since at least Windows 95, possibly earlier.

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Non-Nifty: Bring up the Start menu. The big red button that seems to be an international symbol of a power button/switch, does not power down the computer, it puts it in sleep mode. To actually power down, you have to hit the little black triangle and pick the option you want.

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I do like the way it allows me to turn off the computer by clicking on “Shut down”. On XP, you click on “Turn Off Computer”, and it brings up a box that asks you to select from “Stand By”, “Turn Off Computer”, and “Restart”, which I always found supremely irritating. I SAID Turn off, why ask me again?

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NIFTY - This can be changed! You can set it to power down or sleep, though by default, it’s set to sleep…for some reason.

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I’m going to guess that the response interval has changed, then, so that it does it sooner.

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I’ll be more general. My sister bought a low end laptop last year. It had Vista. It sucked.

I bought a high end laptop this year. I has Vista. It’s fine.

Fine but not great. It’s no better than XP IMHO, but it’s just as stable (or possibly slightly more stable) and it’s not the Antichrist I had been led to believe. It’s a perfectly acceptable modern O/S. Just make sure you’ve got the firepower to run it properly.

That said, I’d have happily stayed with XP if my old machine hadn’t cooked itself.

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Though it does piss me off that all my old programs can’t run their help files.

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The response interval is probably the same as your keyboard repeat rate, which can be changed.

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…and I do this “how”? I right click and go into “properties,” I click on ‘customize’ next to the option for “start menu” and…it’s not there. I don’t see any option to change what the power button does.

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I’m very glad to see this thread. I just got a new computer this last Sunday, so I’m still learning the ins-and-outs of Vista.

Non-Nifty: every time I exit Lord of the Rings Online, the Media Center starts up. Took me a while to fix that one (remove the “mce” bit in LotRO’s MCE shortcut).

Is there a way to have it stop asking me if I’m sure I want to do stuff, like installing programs or, heck, even trying to change some default setting in the OS? I get really tired of that.

It took me a while to figure out how to set it to show hidden files.

Nifty: um… the Aero windows sure are pretty.

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That may well be it, then, that they are set differently.

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This may be what does that. It is the first thing I did when I got Vista: http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm

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Keep in mind that potentially reduces security quite a bit.

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NIFTY!!

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Thank you. Why this isn’t an easy to find option in the Start Menu OR power settings areas is a mystery.

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I’ve got XP Pro and when I click on the Start menu I’ve got ‘Log Off’ or ‘Shut Down’ as choices - I thought it was like that for all versions of XP?