Windows Vista: Tips, Tricks and Rib-Ticklers

I've recently written an essay that discusses the impact Windows Vista will have on semiconductor suppliers to the PC ecosystem; both in PCs themselves and in tethered peripherals and LAN peers. When it's published, I'll give you a heads-up here in this blog, and I'll welcome your feedback. However, in the process of researching it, I collected an assortment of Vista suggestions that I thought you might find useful nearer-term.

First off, however, a welcome update. Back in October of 2005, I alerted you to Microsoft's then-plan to offer a degraded OpenGL graphics API experience under Windows Vista. If software vendors wanted their products to run in the full Aero GUI, they were restricted to now-obsolete and extension-less OpenGL v1.4, which operated through a performance-sapping Direct3D intermediary translation layer. If, on the other hand, a vendor wanted to be able to exploit newer OpenGL revisions (currently at v2.10), along with vendor-proprietary extensions, their ICD (installable client driver) would only be able to run full-screen and would otherwise disable Vista's Desktop Window Manager. However, industry uproar motivated Microsoft to modify its plans, and now a Vista-tuned OpenGL ICD is able to tap into Aero. For more details, see this article.

Now for those tips:

• See here if your Java app disables Aero
• Windows Vista doesn't ship with Hilgraeve's HyperTerminal, which came preinstalled in prior Windows releases beginning with Windows 95. Fortunately, Hilgraeve still offers a free (for private use) edition, downloadable from their website.
• See here if you can no longer use Hibernation after running Vista's Disk Cleanup Tool, or if Hybrid Sleep operates erratically. This Slashdot post links to other sleep and hibernation mode hotfixes.
• Windows Vista includes a largely hidden, but quite powerful, disk partitioning utility.
• See here if you're no longer able to access your programs' help documentation after migrating to Windows Vista.
• I earlier alerted you to a loophole that enabled you to extend the timeframe under which your copy of Windows Vista ran full-featured without being activated to 120 days. Now, per a follow-up Windows Secrets post, a minor registry tweak enables you to extend that activation-free period to at least a year and possibly even longer. Slashdot discussion here.

Speaking of Windows Secrets, its executive editor, Brian Livingston, is co-author of one of two excellent Windows Vista reference manuals that I commend to your inspection. Livingston and Paul Thurrott's Windows Vista Secrets is the latest in a long series of Secrets-themed O/S tomes; Livingston skipped Windows XP in protest, and it's good to have him back. The other highly recommended book is Windows Vista: The Definitive Guide, published by O'Reilly.

I've regularly discussed the ReadyBoost feature built into Windows Vista, in the context of semiconductor-based storage augmentation or replacement of traditional magnetic media-based HDDs. This detailed post documents one user's experiences with ReadyBoost and does a good job of explaining the difference between improvements in initial system responsiveness and sustained performance.

Finally, as an amusing (at least to me) wrap-up to this post, I'll direct you to one writer's analogy of what living with Windows Vista is like, and the accompanying Slashdot critique. Mmmm….meatloaf….