Microsoft Reveals What Windows Vista SP1 Offers

With the first release candidate of Windows Vista SP1 just a few days away, Microsoft is now finally opening up and revealing what can be expected in the first service pack to Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows Vista.

Simply put, Windows Vista SP1 will add tons of added hardware compatibility, loads of compatibility, better system reliability, and Ofcourse better performance and better energy saving for laptops etc.. The standalone installer will come in at about 450MB, but if you were to download Service Pack 1 through Windows Update, it would take only about 65MB. The reason is quite obvious enough, you might have already downloaded many of the hotfixes, security updates and other features that are included in Service Pack 1.

Well here are the few features in SP1 that make me get really excited, and should probably get you excited too…

• Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features.
• SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
• Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
• Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
• Improves power consumption and battery life.
• Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.
• Improves the speed of copying files, folders, and other media.
• Improves startup and resume times when using ReadyBoost.
• Users can control which volumes the disk defragmenter runs on.

Lock Your Drives and Folders Using Registry Tweaks

There are plenty of software which locks drives and folder to protect your confidential data. Why waste money on such tools when you can do it with a simple registry tweak? Here’s how:

Caution: Before you attempt these tweaks, please make sure that you have a backup of your registry, just incase something goes wrong in the middle.

Locking Folders:

• Consider you want to lock a folder named XXXX in your E:\, whose path is E:\XXXX.
• Now open the Notepad and type the following

ren xxxx xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

• Where xxxx is your folder name. Save the text file as loc.bat in the same drive.
• Open another new notepad text file and type the following

ren xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} xxxx

• Save the text file as key.bat in the same drive.

Steps to lock the folder:

• To lock the xxxx folder, simply click the loc.bat and it will transform into control panel icon which is inaccessible.
• To unlock the folder click the key.bat file. Thus the folder will be unlocked and the contents are accessible.

Locking Drives:

We don’t usually prefer to lock our drives, but sometimes it becomes nesscary. Say for instance you might have stored your office documents in D:\ and you don’t want your kids to access it, in such case this technique can be useful for you. Please don’t try this tweak with your root drive (usually C:\ is the root drive) since root drives are not intended to be locked because they are mandatory for the system and application programs.

• Start & Run and type Regedit to open Registry editor
• Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\Explorer
• Create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and set its value as

2^ (Alpha Number of Drive Letter-1) where Alpha number are simple counting of alphabets from A to Z as 1 - 26

For example: to lock C:\, Alpha number of C is 3 so 2^ (3-1) = 4 (decimal value)

• To lock more drives, calculate the value of each drive and then set sum of those numbers as value
• To unlock your drive just delete the key from the registry.