Windows Vista hasn’t been received quite well among the tech communities all over the world and even OEM partners for Microsoft have raised there hands against pre-loading Vista instead of the reliable Windows XP. Addressing all these concerns Microsoft have launched the much waited Vista Service Pack 1 few months back. As a service pack should do it changes lot of internal stuffs and thus making the OS more stable.

Technet and MSDN subscribers are the only ones that are able to download the newly integrated Windows Vista With Service Pack 1 which really saves time if you are stuck with installing Service Pack 1 manually.

It’s simply weired that in Windows Vista won’t let you uninstall Windows Defender which is kinda ultimate useless application of all time. :D Strangely it does allow uninstalling in Windows XP.

Now that Windows Vista installs Windows Defender by default, many people are looking for ways to disable, uninstall or remove it from system so that they could install any other anti-spyware programs. Besides using some precious cpu and memory resources Windows Defender as I already told you is a lameware, also because if you use something like Kaspersky Internet Security its almost impossible for spywares to get inside.

 Most of us have came across Windows Vista, there are many hidden features that are really great and interesting.

Nowadays a standard digital camera supports resolutions upto 7 to 8 megapixels. Recently I purchased one digital cam, as an avid shutterbug I love taking photos here and there. Most of the photos are related to nature, life, gadgets etc and my online buddies love watching them :). As you would know broadband in India sucks, thats why have to resize my images before uploading.

Finally after some time and customer feedback. Microsoft’s long waited Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is finally free for you to download from Windows Update or Microsoft Download Center. According to Microsoft SP1 will address issues related to performance and reliability. Particular gaming compatibility and networking related issues seem to have been fixed.

Download sizes are quite hefty, might take some time for the download to complete (i completed in 15minutes): Another trick is to download the SP1 update via Windows Update which is incredibly small at 65MB.

• Vista SP1 32-bit download (434.5MB)

After Windows Vista came out, lot of programmers tried to port the visual styles to Windows XP and many have succeeded it that. One special add-in is the Vista-style breadcrumbs for Windows XP. Especially handy for those who wanna get some Vista looks without switching over to Windows Vista for the time being.

QT Address Bar is simple application, just unzip it to a location of your choice and then double click on the QTAddressBar.exe file.

Select the Install option, and then click the Next button to register the component with Windows.

 Slowness is something you associate with Windows Vista, today i found out a cool trick to fasten menus under Windows Vista. Here’s how it goes.

Click on the Vista Start icon and type in regedit in the search field or use the RUN Command now press Enter.

This opens the Registry Editor. Where you will see the various registry folders in the upper left side as shown below.

Now navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Click on Desktop

This opens several values in the left panel. Now Double click on “MenuShowDelay”.

 With Windows Vista its possible you can get stuck sometimes with an error, which would look unrecoverable. Have you ever encountered the “BOOTMGR is missing”, I hope this error seems familiar.

Sometimes this error happens for unknown reasons, sometimes hardware issues!

Now to fix this quickly, lets boot off with the Windows Vista DVD now click Next at the first prompt:

When you move on to the next prompt, you should be able to see a link in the lower left-hand side “Repair your computer”