Tricks from the Vista masters

Did you know that roughly 400 tons of dirt, gravel, rock, and sand have to be searched to locate 1 carat of diamond? And that diamond, when located, must be cut by an expert and polished just right before being placed in a setting that complements it completely? Well, when searching for gems within an OS, it takes effort and creativity as well. Here are three Windows Vista “gems” that might make your workday a bit easier or assist you in administration.

1. Navigating through Shortcuts is a great way to increase productivity. The Windows key will bring up the Start menu, but when combined with other keys, it can do more than you may know. For example, Windows-D will show the desktop without your sidebar. If you want to see that sidebar, just press Windows-space bar. For a quick way to access our old friend the Run command, hit Windows-R. There are plenty of others that you can find by a search online, but one of the coolest is the ability to use the Windows key to select icons in your quick-launch bar. If you count from the left the various icons in your quick-launch bar, then hit the Windows key and the number that corresponds with the icon, it will open up that application.

Free fun trick: Minimize all open applications (Windows-M for speed), now hold down the Ctrl button and use the scroll wheel on your mouse. Watch as the icons on your desktop grow and shrink. Check out this list of shortcuts for your Vista system.

2. Multiple local GPOs. In Windows 2000/XP systems, you are given a single local Group Policy Object (GPO) to configure. The settings allow you to configure your system in a safer, more convenient way than with Windows 95/98 systems, which required registry edits to modify the deeper aspects of the system. But a single GPO can be frustrating when you want to disable features for one local user, but not others. Vista allows you to create multiple Local GPOs for an environment that doesn’t have Active Directory in place. So if you are using Vista at home, at a school, or library as a kiosk machine, you can take advantage of these policies. The trick is in finding the settings to create multiple policies. It isn’t as easy as you might think. To start, open up an MMC console and add the Group Policy Object Editor snap-in. The Group Policy wizard will begin. Select Browse, and a dual-tabbed Computers/Users dialog opens. From here, you can select individual users to configure, or you can use the Administrators/Non-Administrators policies.

3. CompletePC backups make VHD files. One of the cool features to the CompletePC backup process is that the resulting backup file is a .vhd file. If that extension looks familiar to you, it might be because you’ve been working with Virtual PC, the free downloadable tool from Microsoft that allows you to install virtual OSes to work with. Now, before you get too excited and think that you can now book up with the CompletePC backup file and see a duplicate of your OS, that isn’t going to happen. The .vhd file, however, is mountable. You can configure another virtual OS to view that .vhd file as another drive. You can then access files that have been backed up without having to restore the entire system. Even better, you can use a tool called vhdmount to mount the .vhd file without having to use a virtual OS. This tool from Microsoft allows you to mount the .vhd file directly from your host OS. Note: You can download the tool with the entire Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 – Enterprise Edition. You are welcome to perform a custom install and only install vhdmount if you don’t want to install Virtual Server.

If you liked these tricks, stay tuned for future ones on Server 2008 and Exchange 2007.