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Windows Insight

A newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users by Serdar Yegulalp, former Senior Technology Editor of Winmag.com, with over twelve years of Windows experience under his belt.Check out our ongoing series, The XP User's Guide to Windows Vista!

Control Panel Suddenly InexplorableDecember 3 2007

Here's a weird problem: At one point I switched Control Panel from the Category view to the Classic view (i.e., icons).  After that, Control Panel wouldn't load any more -- it would crash Explorer instantly.

Turned out the problem was a corrupt folder-view entry in the Registry.  I went to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell and deleted Bags and BagsMRU.  All was well again.

Avoiding the WPAD ExploitNovember 29 2007

CRN (among others) have posted word about an exploit in Windows -- including Vista! -- that uses the Windows Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) function.  This is one of those features that most people never use anyway and which should be disabled by default, so you're probably better off turning it off completely as a pre-emptive measure.  See the 2nd link for instructions on how to do this; the whole thing takes maybe 30 seconds.

When Silicon Image Won't Image CDsNovember 22 2007

I ran into a problem with a solution this weekend while preparing to burn a DVD to bring to my parents over the Thanksgiving weekend: Seems that CD/DVD burners attached to a Silicon Image SATA interface aren't recognized as burners in Windows Vista.

The good news: Microsoft knows it's a problem and has a hotfix available for it immediately.  (They've had this hotfix out for some time, as a matter of fact.)  Said hotfix will also appear in Vista SP1, but you can grab it now from the download link listed here.

Start Me Up ... Faster!October 17 2007

I recently noted that Vista has some interesting new behaviors regarding applications that are launched from the Startup folder.  By default, their I/O priorities are throttled back for a total of one minute from launch.  This is a good idea to keep lots of smaller or background-use applications from all starting up at once, but it doesn't seem to be such a good idea if you try to boot an application like Outlook, which is by nature I/O intensive, by putting it in the Startup folder.

To that end, I tried a few experiments.  I wrote a batch file to start up several major applications -- Outlook, Word, Windows Live Writer, AIM and at least one or two other things -- and put it into the Startup group.  Between each program launch, I instigated a forced seven-second delay by using the CHOICE command (a sneaky trick I picked up from somewhere).  I wanted to see if this would cause any difference in the amount of utilization or responsiveness.

When I used this to launch the programs in question, all of them were launched at the Very Low I/O priority -- and the end result was that they were all fairly difficult to work with during that low I/O period.

I then took the same batch file out of the Startup group and ran it from the desktop after a cold boot.  The programs in question all started up quite snappily and I could choose between any of them without difficulty -- and they were all running at Normal I/O priority, too.

So here's my tentative r

PowerMenuOctober 16 2007

I love all-in-one utilities that do a bunch of things in as little space as possible.  Aside from allSnap, I recently bumped into another tool that I use as a regular adjunct to my Vista installs: PowerMenu.

PowerMenu adds four things to every single control menu for a window: a priority control, a transparency control, an "Always On Top" function, and a "Minimize to Tray" tool.  That's three or four separate utilities packed into one, and even though PowerMenu was originally written back in 1998 (!), it still runs extremely well with Vista.  Obviously I'd like to see it brought up to date whenever possible, but it works well enough right now that I can recommend it with little hesitation.