If you are already using Google or Yahoo Toolbar you probably won’t want to use the built-in search box in Internet Explorer 7. There’s a quick registry fix that you can do to enable / disable this.

Open up Notepad and copy the following and save it to something “IE7_NoSearchBar.reg”. Then merge it into the registry by double clicking it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Infodelivery\Restrictions]
“NoSearchBox”=dword:00000001

To disable copy this following code and save. After that merge it to the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Infodelivery\Restrictions]
“NoSearchBox”=dword:00000000

Manually locating the Windows Vista product key from the registry is next to impossible as its encrypted. Luckily, a number of free programs exist to help find product keys.

1. Choose a free product key finder program that supports Windows Vista.
2. Download and run the key finder program. Follow the instruction.
3. The product key should be formatted like xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx - five sets of five letters and numbers.
4. Write this key code down exactly as the program displays it to you for use when reinstalling Windows Vista.

To me restarting my PC is one of the most annoying thing that I come across daily. Besides Vista takes up around one to two minutes to boot up sometimes. Even Windows XP slowly crawls at around a minute to load. Most of the time this happens due to myself frequently installing things that i shouldn’t and end up trashing the PC which results in a restart. Ofcourse there is a trick involving tricking the PC do a “warm reboot,” rather than a “cold boot.” The trick involves holding down the SHIFT key when invoking the restart.

 You might been thinking what the hell happened to the Administrator account that was usually created in prior versions of Windows.

Windows Vista creates that account each time you install it. But for some reason I dono, its disabled by default thus can’t be used. I’m sure sometimes you would love to run as administrator just to troubleshoot or do some tweaks, just a simple command can enable it.

Enable Built-in Administrator Account

First you’ll need to  bring up a command prompt in administrator mode by right-clicking and choosing “Run as administrator” (or use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut from the search box)

Today I’m gono show you some cool Vista tips that I’m sure you haven’t seen.

Open Command Prompt Here:

In Vista you can get some extra menus for your properties box just by holding the “Shift” key and right clicking on a file. As you can see below a command prompt button. Now you can easily open the folders and run, scripts easily without having to type long paths.

To..

Copy As Path:

VLC player is my favorite media player not just because its a free, open source alternative to WMP or other alternatives, but due the fact that it supports almost all audio or video files out there. But the problem is that it doesn’t always work correctly on Windows Vista.

Normally you would face problem with some video extensions. But with some small tweaks, I’m sure it will work in most cases.

1:First up, open VLC Player, Click Settings -> Preferences

As you would probably know Expose is an application for Mac OSX which lets you quickly tile windows and with a flick of a key you could go to your desired window. But hey could we do that with Windows Vista too….. Yes! you can. With a cool application named Switcher your life could be little easier.

Switcher lets you select between three views firstly, default tiled view that Mac purists are accustomed to.

Next up is the Dock view that is more like a switching between tiles in a parallel manner on the top of the desktop. All you need is to hit the tab key to switch between windows.