Five pointless things to do in Vista
By John Lister
Fed up with hints and tips telling you all the life-changing things you can do in Vista? Well here are some ‘features’ and applications which serve little or no useful purpose – but it’s nice to know you can do them.
1) Create your own Blue Screen of Death
Sure, Vista isn’t as stable as many people hoped, but nothing quite compares with the old-school white-on-blue disaster announcement. The staff of ZDNet have now figured out how to recreate those rage-inducing crashes. Bear in mind that if you do this, you will have to reboot and you will lose any unsaved work.
All you need to do is run the Registry Editor (‘regedit’ in the command box), find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\i8042prt\\Parameters
create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value, call it CrashOnCtrlScroll, and change the data value to 1.
Then just restart your machine, after which you can hold down the right-hand Ctrl key and hit Scroll Lock twice to say farewell to your GUI.
(Practical use: It’s a pretty severe way to test remote system recovery tools.)
2) Change the start-up screen
Bored of the ‘Microsoft Corporation’/progress bar start-up routine. If you’d prefer something that sort of, a bit, kinda looks like the Northern Lights, just run MSCONFIG from the command box, click on Boot, check ‘No GUI boot’ under Boot Options, then restart.
(Practical use: It’s appears to be a troubleshooting feature and may block some programs from starting automatically.)
3) Find out the time the complicated way
Open up Notepad, type in ‘.LOG’ (minus the quotes) and save it under any name, selecting ‘All Files’ rather than ‘.txt file’. Immediately open the file and it will now display the time and date.
(Practical use: It’s a logging feature which automatically adds the date and time every time you save the file, which could be handy if you haven’t figured out how to use a real diary.)
4) Take screenshots of part of the screen
Vista includes ‘Snipping Tool’ (just type that into the Windows Menu search bar), which allows you to take a free-form ‘snip’. Rather than taking a shot of the entire screen, you can draw around the exact section you want to ‘snap’, regardless of the shape.
(Practical use: It’s inherently useful… assuming you haven’t figured out how to use the crop or lasso features in your image editor of choice.)
5) Reverse your mouse
By downloading InvertMouse, you can make your mouse work back to front. The left button performs the right-button’s function, moving the mouse up makes the cursor move down, and so on.
(Practical use: It’s often billed as a ‘hilarious’ prank to play on friends or co-workers. There are some reports of video games causing bugs that reverse the mouse’s behaviour, so this could serve as a temporary fix.)
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on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
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Stumble It!
August 24th, 2008
John,
You missed an obvious one: the most pointless thing that can be done with Vista is to install it in the first place.
(Practical uses: too many to mention - they wouldn’t fit, not even in very, very, very long post).
August 24th, 2008
I would have thought invert mouse would be good for left handers.
However, I love Vista. Still don’t know what all the fuss is about after all this time! Stop whining people and enjoy it.
August 25th, 2008
@Kim,
“However, I love Vista”.
Good for you. If you are happy to buy a top-end PC so that you can run a bloated OS that is hobbled by DRM, and is much slower as a consequence, that’s certainly your prerogative.
“Still don’t know what all the fuss is about after all this time!”
Either you:
a) have been living under a rock,
b) are a very dim individual, or
c) are in the employ of Microsoft.
“Stop whining people … ”
People are not “whining”, Kim. They are voicing, quite understandably, their extreme displeasure at being saddled with the biggest load of rubbish ever to come out of Redmond. They are sick and tired of being treated with utter contempt by Microsoft, whose management, in their arrogance, think that they can dictate terms to all and sundry. Vista is a disaster for Microsoft, and their biggest problem is that *everyone* knows it - and there are not enough tame journalists, shills and trolls to cover up the facts.
” … and enjoy it.”
Not many people are “enjoying” Vista, Kim - even the employees at Microsoft do not like it. Many of those who have no choice but to use Vista tolerate it; those who do have a choice are using alternatives - XP, Linux and Apple - and that is why Microsoft management are so rattled.
August 26th, 2008
Kim is right.
It is a good OS people need to stop crying and get over it. If you don’t want the new hardware to run the OS then stick with what you have.
Try putting XP on a 486. Think about it, newer OS’s require newer hardware.
You wouldn’t put the latest Mac OS on an old Mac.
I like vista also.
November 9th, 2008
Linux is by far the best OS out there and currently on this damn laptop of mine i’m forced to use Vista. Its too complicated and not user friendly. Window’s has messed up my computer’s for far too long and what stinks is one has to pay for getting the newest version of Windows Linux is free and virus free. LINUX SHALL TAKE OVER!
November 27th, 2008
I’m one of the lucky Vista 32bit owners who loves to watch TV on my HDMI 24″ flat screen. I use MS Media Center & a Yukon TV card to display it and its just beautiful. My only complaint is that on local channels ONLY (over a cable set top box input) I get a BSob half way through every commercial. It tries to recover twice and then crashes or freezes the computer.
I have a Gateway tripple core AMD with 2 G of Ram and and integrated ATI Radon FD3200 graphics chip set. The computer is less than 6 months old. So where’s my problem?
Is it VISTA
Is it the MMedia Center
Is it ATI HW/SW
It is a damned (&*^%$) to reboot every 15 or so minutes.
The event viewer say my error is ATIKMDAG which is a time out catch all. Driver Heaven lists 100s of Gamers with the same error code and a few TV users.
They say the problem exist with NVidia graphic card too.
I am really disappointed because I wanted to drive all the TV’s in my home thru Media Extenders and give each TV access to my PC as Micro Soft advertises.
Well, was I suprised when my PC/Vista System couldn’t even receive one TV channel w/o crashing
So in summary, if you love Vista for doing E-Mail and some minor Web surfing Enjoy Vista its cute and kinda pretty. But if you expect it to do any kind of real work likie gaming or TV better wait a few years until Micro Soft is ready to fix some of its major problems and get out of a finger pointing contest with ATI and NVIDIA.
Or maybe the new Digital TV signals in February will make everything get better. Boy is that optomistic!
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone
Save a place at the table for the other turkey in the house (VISTA) LOL
Jim (Dayton OH)