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)

 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”

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.

Here’s an interesting video on how to you can recover your lost Windows password. The video will guide you through few techniques that can help you recover or reset your lost windows password……looks cool like those nonsense hacking movies.

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: