http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vistaze6.jpg
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/3905/vista1lu8.jpg
This is with system restore- ON
TCP options string = 020405b40103030201010402
MTU = 1500
MTU is fully optimized for broadband.
This is right out of box, no tweaking, TCP Window Size is auto set, so no speed up programs work, can't change TCP Opts to 1, but im sure it's done auto.
You talk about different, man this is different in every way, I've had it 3 days and all I have changed is auto logon with admin account.
MSS = 1460
Maximum useful data in each packet = 1460, which equals MSS.
Default TCP Receive Window (RWIN) = 65700
RWIN Scaling (RFC1323) = 2 bits (scale factor of 4)
Unscaled TCP Receive Window = 16425
RWIN is not fully optimized (even though it is a comparatively large number). The unscaled RWIN value is lower than it should be. Also, RWIN being close to and above 65535 does not justify the header overhead of enabling TCP 1323 Options. You might want to use one of the recommended RWIN values below.
RWIN is a multiple of MSS
Other RWIN values that might work well with your current MTU/MSS:
513920 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 8)
256960 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 4)
128480 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 2)
64240 (MSS x 44)
bandwidth * delay product (Note this is not a speed test):
Your TCP Window limits you to: 2628 kbps (329 KBytes/s) @ 200ms
Your TCP Window limits you to: 1051 kbps (131 KBytes/s) @ 500ms
MTU Discovery (RFC1191) = ON
Time to live left = 112 hops
TTL value is ok.
Timestamps (RFC1323) = OFF
Selective Acknowledgements (RFC2018) = ON
IP type of service field (RFC1349) = 00100000 (32)
Precedence (priority) = 001 (priority)
Delay = 0 (normal delay)
Throughput = 0 (normal throughput)
Reliability = 0 (normal reliability)
Cost = 0 (normal cost)
Check bit = 0 (correct, 8th checking bit must be zero)
DiffServ (RFC 2474) =
Found this on another Forum, so im a thief, love bank robbers, hehe
Open command prompt here
I don't know about your workflow as a developer, but I often find myself switching back and forward between an Explorer window and the command shell. For example, sometimes I'm looking around the filesystem for a project that I created a while back and then I want to build it from the command line or rename some of the files or something.
Here's a trick that I don't think many people are aware of. Right-click on any folder on your Windows Vista machine while holding down the shift key. You'll see an extra context-sensitive menu item there: Open Command Prompt here. Just click on this menu and a command window will open with the current working directory set to the folder's actual location.
Figure: folder context-sensitive menu, with and without the shift key modifier.
In the past there was a Windows XP powertoy that did this; now it's built into the operating system (albeit hidden away to protect the unwary from themselves). What's really cool about this is that if the target folder is a network location, Windows Vista silently maps a network drive to that location before opening the folder (so that your command prompt has a valid path containing a drive letter) and then deletes the network drive once the command prompt is closed.
Copy as Path
Ever wanted to copy a link from a network file share into an email, and wound up having to traverse the path, click on the address bar, copy the details out, paste it in and then type the filename itself (with the appropriate quotation marks?
With Windows Vista, there's an easier way. In the same hidden context-sensitive menu I mentioned in the above hint, there's another helpful shortcut: Copy as Path. Unlike the command prompt trick, this menu item appears both for files and folders, so you can use this anywhere you want to quickly grab a shortcut to send someone else.
Bringing Back Start / Run
The Start menu got a big overhaul in Windows Vista, with a number of significant changes made as a result of usability testing and research. One of the nicest innovations to my mind is the search bar at the bottom, which searches through your programs, document files, emails and anything else for which a search provider is registered; this saves a lot of time hunting around. Want to run Powerpoint without having to browse around the "All Programs" menu? Just type "Powerpoint" in the searchbar. Can't remember which of the myriad dialog boxes and settings you have to go through to find the Device Manager? Just type "device" in the search bar.
Of course, there are times when you may still just want the fast but dumb Run dialog that Windows XP provided:
It seems that some people think we got rid of this altogether, when in fact we just removed it from the default settings since most people won't need it any longer. The quick way to get at it is to use the Win+R shortcut key combination at any time - this is what I tend to use most of the time.
If you want to restore it permanently to your Start menu, here's what you do:
Right-click on the Start menu and choose Properties;
Select the Start Menu tab and click on the Customize... button;
Ensure the "Run command" option is checked.
Now the Start / Run command will be restored to its full glory. Of course, you can swap in and out a bunch of other choices (I like the Administrative Tools to be right there, but I don't much care for Pictures, Games and Music to be top-level items on my work machine.) Here's how I have my default menu configured - you'll see it's also docked to the left-hand side of the screen:
Disabling UAC
If you're a reader of this blog, I'm going to take a low-risk gamble and assert that you probably consider yourself a power user. You pride yourself in the responsibility of having full and absolute control over your machine environment and anything that comes between that perfect human-machine symbiosis is to be spurned. If only there were a way to turn User Account Control off on a Windows Vista machine, you'd upgrade immediately. Well, dear reader, I'm here to help.
Firstly, it's worth a brief digression into the benefits of this feature. Running as admin is a bad thing, as most of us know. Aaron Margosis has blogged extensively on this issue, and I won't rehash it here. But for reasons of compatibility, running as a standard user can still be a somewhat painful proposition. Windows Vista attempts to give you the benefits of both worlds by allowing administrators to execute most processes in the context of a standard user and only elevating the privileges on their user token by consent, in addition to allowing standard user accounts to perform administrative tasks by selectively elevating a process to use administrator-level credentials.
In general, UAC has turned out pretty well. It was pretty intrusive in early builds, prompting often and sometimes capturing focus at the wrong time. For the vast majority of users, UAC will offer a valuable level of security protection that will protect against malware: it simply won't have the rights to perform invasive actions like installing device drivers or services. Once a system is configured, you'll rarely see UAC prompts unless you're an inveterate settings tweaker. Incidentally, you can find out a great deal more about how UAC works, what you need to do to your own applications so that they co-operate well with UAC, and the rationale for its design at the official UAC blog.
It is possible to switch UAC off. I really don't recommend it - if you like full control over your machine, surely you want to know when something is attempting to perform an administrative-level action? Nevertheless, I'd prefer to have you run Windows Vista without UAC than having you run a different operating system.
There are two ways to disable UAC. The easy solution is through Control Panel. Type "UAC" into the search bar at the top of the screen and you'll see this task presented:
This approach is pretty brute-force, though. It just switches the whole thing off. There's a more subtle configuration choice that gives you some of the benefits of UAC without any of the prompting. You'll need to edit the local security policy to control this, as follows:
From the Start search bar, type "Local Security Policy"
Accept the elevation prompt
From the snap-in, select Security Settings -> Local Policy -> Security Options
Scroll down to the bottom, where you'll find nine different group policy settings for granular configuration of UAC.
Perhaps the best choice to select is to change the setting:
User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode
from Prompt for consent to Elevate without prompting.
What does this do? Despite the warning from the Windows Security Center, UAC isn't actually switched off. It's still there, and all your processes will still run as a standard user. To prove this, open a command prompt and try to save a file to the c:\ directory. You'll get an access denied error message. However, when a process is marked for elevation, instead of getting the secure desktop elevation prompt, the request will be silently approved. To show this in action, right click on a command prompt shortcut and choose "Run as Administrator". You'll see the command prompt open without elevation, but the window title will show that you're running with full administrative privileges.
Using this approach is better than nothing, but it's a bit like relying on everyone else having a vaccination against measles to protect yourself from infection. Read the explanations on the second page of the property sheet for each policy setting before tinkering, and be careful!
Running Quick Launch Items
Do you have a few applications that you're always firing up? Would you like a system-wide keyboard shortcut to run them? Here's what you do. Simply add shortcuts to the Quick Launch toolbar, as shown in the screenshot below.
Now you can simply use Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 and so on to launch each application. For example, on my machine, Win+3 launches Notepad and Win+6 launches the VS command prompt. This works no matter what application has the focus.
Running a Command Prompt During Setup
If you're doing a fresh install of Windows Vista, you'll probably use a bootable DVD so that you're able to reformat the system partition. But sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where you could really use a command prompt as you go through those initial configuration stages (for example, when I installed Windows Vista on my home media center machine I needed to run the diskpart command line utility to convert a dynamic disk back to a basic disk structure).
Here's the magic key sequence: simply press Shift+F10, and you'll be presented with a command prompt. This also works after Windows Vista has rebooted for the first time on an upgrade, although be very careful what you do here - there's almost no good reasons to be interacting with the system at this point in time, and you shouldn't expect us to get you out of any holes you dig yourself into if you start making invasive changes at this point in time.
The Oldest Component in Windows?
We go to fairly extreme lengths to try to maintain compatibility with older applications, as Raymond Chen's blog often demonstrates in vivid fashion. As an example of this, some of you may remember seeing Jim Allchin's demonstration of Visicalc (the earliest spreadsheet) at PDC 2003 running on Windows Vista (then known as "Longhorn", of course).
So I wondered - what is the oldest component still present in Windows Vista? After a bit of digging around, I think I've finally discovered the answer.
Dear old edlin, the very first line editor in MS-DOS, is still available for your batch editing pleasure over a quarter of a century after its introduction. According to wikipedia, edlin even pre-dates MS-DOS, having been written for an even earlier operating system that was one of the company's first acquisitions. My first exposure to MS-DOS was version 3.2 on my father's office computer, and I used to remember most of the mnemonic commands by heart. It's not a user-friendly tool, but it was fast to load and more forgiving of mistakes than the alternative of copy con filename.txt.
This is one secret that has mere curiosity value, but I still have a warm spot for this venerable editor and I salute its indefatigability!
Zoom in Explorer
The awesome guys from the Windows Vista Magazine revealed a great Windows Vista secret recently that I wanted to bring to a broader audience.
When you're browsing around the file system in Explorer, it's often useful to be able to quickly switch between different folder views. If you're looking at a folder with lots of long filenames, maybe the Details view works best. If you're looking at a folder with lots of photos, maybe a small thumbnail view works well; for a folder with lots of documents, maybe a larger thumbnail view works better. Now you can use the Views button on the toolbar to modify this - click the button to toggle between views or use the down arrow to get access to the slider - but it's quicker to use a shortcut. Simply hold down the Ctrl key and use your mouse scrollwheel to resize the icons from small to extra large.
What's really cool about this, as Jon points out, is that it also works on the desktop itself. If the desktop has focus, simply do Ctrl+mousewheel and you can go from the regular 48x48 icons to full 256x256 photographic-quality renditions. For those of you who have a desktop filled with documents and shortcuts, you can of course also use this feature to cram even more on your screen so that you never have to create a folder again!
Kill the Startup Monsters
If there's one thing that puts me off an application, it's when it unnecessarily inserts itself into the Windows startup process so that it can have its very own system tray icon from whence it can spam me with annoying messages. Obviously it makes sense for some applications to run on startup (for example, I want Windows Live Messenger to be running without me needing to manually start it each time). The problem is that there are multiple places where an application can register itself for execution on startup, and this makes it hard to retain control over which programs are granted such esteemed status.
Of course, I wouldn't be writing this entry unless Windows Vista had a solution! From the start menu search bar, type System Configuration, and click on the link that comes up. You'll be required to provide privilege elevation unless you've disabled UAC, and then you'll see the following utility:
As you can see from the above screenshot, the Startup tab enumerates all the applications that are set to run as startup, regardless of whether they are set in the registry (either per-machine or per-user), the user profile, or simply the startup folder in the Programs entry of the start menu. You can disable any or all of them; they'll still be listed there so that you can switch them on again if you need to.
I should note in passing that this tool also allows you to do some other pretty useful things, like editing your boot configuration database (no need to master arcane bcdedit commands any longer) or accessing a variety of other system tools and utilities. It's the power user's configuration tool of choice - go check it out!
Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes
User Account Control is, as I mentioned in secret #4, an important part of the security protection that Windows Vista offers. For any user with administrative credentials, you can always execute a process with full admin rights by right-clicking on the executable or shortcut and choosing "Run as Administrator".
For myself, I regularly want to open an admin-level command prompt, and it's a distraction to have to move my hands off the keyboard to go through the elevation contortions. So I was delighted to find a little keyboard shortcut for launching an elevated process. Simply press Ctrl+Shift+Enter from the search bar on the start menu with a selected application, and that triggers elevation.
For example, to launch an elevated command prompt, simply press the Win key; type cmd; press Ctrl+Shift+Enter; and then hit Alt+C to confirm the elevation prompt. Six keystrokes to an elevated command prompt!
(Once I've got an elevated command prompt, I always like to execute color 4f as my first input so that this console window is visually differentiated from other non-elevated windows.)
Deleting the Undeletable
As many of us move forward from Windows XP or prior beta versions of Windows Vista to the final RTM version, I thought this little tip / secret might be in order. You may be aware that Windows Vista includes a number of different ways to upgrade a computer, from a straight in-place upgrade (insert CD, run setup and choose upgrade) to Windows Easy Transfer, which allows you to copy settings, programs and data from an old setup a fresh shiny new OS environment. But I'm the purist type who hates even the thought of leaving any detritus around and insists upon a clean install to a pure, unsullied partition.
In doing this, it's not unusual to find some folders that can't be accessed, even by an administrator, because their ACLs were set for accounts with SIDs that applied to an old partition. For example, on my home machine, I switched the C: and D: drive cables around and installed Windows Vista RTM on the new drive. Having tested everything worked, I wanted to delete some old redundant directories (like the old \Program Files directory). If even an administrator can't access the file, how do you take it back?
The secret lies in two command-line utilities, one ancient, the other completely revised for this release. Respectively, these are takeown (which takes ownership of a file or directory) and icacls (which sets new ACLs on that directory). I created a small batch command on my system called itsmine.cmd, as follows:
takeown /f %1 /r /d y
icacls %1 /grant administrators:F /t
From an elevated command prompt, you can run a command such as itsmine d:\hard_to_delete and this will reset ownership and ACLs on the hard_to_delete directory such that a command like rd /s d:\hard_to_delete should work.
Managing Windows
Win+Tab Flip 3D [more info]
Ctrl+Win+Tab Persistent Flip 3D
Win+T Cycle through applications on taskbar (showing its live preview)
Win+M Minimize all open windows
Win+Shift+M Undo all window minimization
Win+D Toggle showing the desktop
Starting Programs
Win+1 Open the first program on your Quick Launch bar
Win+2 Open the second program on your Quick Launch bar
Win+n Open the nth program on your Quick Launch bar
Win+U Open the ease of access center
Win+F Open the search window
Win+E Open Explorer
Win+R Open the Run window
Ctrl+Shift+Esc Open Windows Task Manager
Logging In And Out
While the below shortcuts seem unwieldy because of their length, they're quite easy to remember once you try them out a few times.
Win, ->, ->, ->, Enter Shutdown
Win, ->, ->, ->, U Shutdown
Win, ->, ->, ->, R Restart
Win, RightArrow Sleep
Win, ->, ->, ->, W Switch Users
Win+L Locks computer
Viewing Folders With Explorer
Alt+LeftArrow Go back
Alt+RightArrow Go forward
Alt+UpArrow Go up a directory
Alt+D Move focus to address bar
Alt+D, Tab Move focus to search bar
Ctrl+Mousewheel Change the view type (extra large, small, list view, detail, etc.)
Windows Sidebar And Gadgets
Windows Sidebar provides instant access to gadgets that display a huge variety personalizable information. The below shortcuts allow you to navigate between these gadgets. I suggest just using this table as a reference, since people don't need to navigate gadgets too often.
Move focus to Sidebar Win+Space
Cycle through visible gadgets Win+G