Things I hate about Vista, and How I fixed them.

I've been using Windows Vista off and on since the first release years ago and have watched it grow and turn into a pretty good OS. (yes some of you hate it, I know, I know...but I don't care) Durring this time I have found that there are things I love about Vista, things I like about Vista, and things that just irritate me about Vista. So instead of just dealing with the problems, I decided to fix them.

1. The size of the icons on your desktop are freaking huge. Even at the smallest size they are way bigger than what I wanted. So I installed ObjectDock by Stardock and chose not to see desktop icons in my display settings. It's essentially a clone of the dock that the Mac OS comes with. I always liked that feature in OS X so now I have it on my PC and it got rid of the giant icons.


2. The Log-in screen. I hate the way it shows the user image when you try to log in. And for security reasons I prefer it not to show the last user who logged in, so I altered the local security policy so when the computer turns on, you need to press CTRL-ALT-DEL then enter your user name and password. No user image, no pre-filled user name. To do this go to control panels --> Administrative Tools --> Local Security Policy --> Local Policies --> Security Options and then set "Interactive Log on: Do not require CTRL+ALT+DEL" to disabled. Also set "Interactive Log on: Do not display last user name" to Enabled.


3. It's sluggish at times. Set page file to 2500MB (set, not variable or controlled by the computer. This prevents the drive from getting as fragmented) I also turned off the visual aspects I don't like (not all of them because I like Aero and Glass) and use ReadyBoost. Having 2Gb of RAM in my laptop doesn't hurt much either.


4. Vista User Account Control: From a security standpoint this is a great feature, it doesn't allow the user to do anything requiring Administrative level privileges without checking first. Its similar to how even if you are logged into a admin account in a *nix environment you still need to specify that you want to run a task as an admin. From a usability standpoint, it sucks. So I turned it off. Id explain it how, but My Digital Life does a nicer job and give 6 ways to turn it off.

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