If you have an audio card (or some people call it sound card) that supports multiple outputs and actually using it for different purposes such as playing games, watching movies & listening to music, you’ll have to go through the hassle of changing the audio output in Windows Vista Control Panel.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a headphone and speakers. In order to change the audio output, you’ll have to close the program that is currently outputing the audio and right click on the speaker icon, choose Playback Devices, right-click on the playback device that you want and select Set as Default. Then click OK to close the sound configuration window and relaunch the program and play the audio. That will make it change from one output to the other, but it is troublesome and involves many steps.

Here are a few easy to use tools that can help you easily switch the default playback device.
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When I started using Windows Vista, one of the cool feature I noticed was my DVD-RW drive automatically ejects when I click on the drive in Windows Explorer! There’s also a window saying “Insert a disc. Please insert a disc into drive E:.” How nice, Vista is supposedly smart enough to eject when there are no disc in the drive. Well, the coolness only lasted for a while and it became an annoyance because I will occasionally wrongly click on the DVD-RW drive when I actually wanted to access my hard drive. When it ejects, I had to manually close it. The worst part was my computer case has a cover that covers the DVD drive. So whenever I accidentally click on the DVDRW drive, the DVDRW tray will eject and hit on my computer case cover which I don’t think it is pleasant to the hardware.

I tried searching for a setting or registry hack that can turn off my DVDRW drive auto eject in Windows Vista but couldn’t find any. It seems that this “feature” is hard coded and there is no way to disable it. I don’t believe that it can’t be done so I did a little research, and I found an easy way to disable Windows Vista CD/DVD drive auto eject feature.
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It’s weird when Windows Defender is still in BETA, many Windows XP users eagerly wanting to install and see how great it is. Now Windows Vista has Windows Defender installed by default, many people are looking for ways to disable, uninstall or remove it from system as they prefer to use other anti spyware programs. Is Windows Defender a failure? I don’t know because I don’t use it as well since I already have Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 on my computer.

In my opinion, if you’ve downloaded and installed Windows Defender in Windows XP, you can simply uninstall it from Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel. But as for Windows Vista, it is built-in and I don’t recommend you to uninstall and remove it from your hard drive. The safest way is stopping Windows Defender from auto running whenever Windows Vista is booted up.

Here is how to safely disable Windows Defender in Windows Vista.
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This weird behavior happened right after I’ve reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I’ve only updated Windows and did not install any third party software. Whenever I try to access or even right click a ZIP file on a network share, I got an annoying error message “This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Would you like to continue?”

It’s no big deal because clicking Yes button would allow me to access the ZIP file. However, this is not normal because I do not have this problem last time and I also don’t want to be clicking the YES button every time I access a ZIP file on a network share.
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The title of this article explains it all! DataRecovery is freeware and written by TOKIWA(a japanese) to undelete accidentally deleted files even from recycle bin. This might not be the BEST data recovery software but it’s one of the few that works on Windows Vista and it’s FREE. Only 3 steps is required to recover deleted files from Windows.
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OK, you’ve just purchased Windows Vista from Windows Marketplace and you selected “Digital Locker Download” instead of “Buy and Ship“. Buy and Ship might cost more and also have to wait for the delivery. You made your payment and the links to download Windows Vista is made available to you. There are 3 files to download which is:
1. boot.wim (116.31 MB)
2. install.wim (2.25 GB)
3. X13-49120.exe (73.76 MB)

After spending hours downloading, it has finally finished. This is how you can make your own Windows Vista DVD from the 3 files you’ve downloaded from Digital River.
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I’ve always mentioned it’s good to have frequent backup of your data. In case if your system gets corrupted, you can reinstall your Windows at any time and then restore your data from backup. I personally NEVER use System Restore. I also turn off System Restore after installing Windows to get back my disk space. By default, Windows XP takes up 12% of my disk space which is a waste if I do not use System Restore at all. System Restore works “sometimes” but when it doesn’t work, everything gets messed up.

To turn off System Restore in Windows XP is easy. Just right click on My Computer, select Properties. System Properties will appear. Go to System Restore tab and check “Turn off System Restore“. You can also change the percent of disk space usage by sliding the slider if you still want to use System Restore but do not want it to take up so much space.

Problem with Windows Vista is, there’s is no easy way to change the disk space usage for it’s System Restore. Here’s how you can easily change Windows Vista system restore disk space usage by a small batch file.
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