In this tutorial we will show you how to use the Windows Sidebar - a new application included in the Windows Vista operating system. You will learn how to tweak it, how to add or remove gadgets and where to find them on the internet.

Windows Sidebar is situated by default on the right side of your screen and initially it has three gadgets: Clock, SlideShow and Feed Headlines. It offers the following customization options: it can be hidden, kept on top of other windows, you can add and remove gadgets from it or detach gadgets to place them on your desktop.

Windows Sidebar is one of the new applications included in Windows Vista. Basically, it is a long, vertical bar displayed on the right side of your desktop. The Sidebar contains mini-programs called gadgets which may be used to display useful information or provide easy access to different tools. The gadgets can be run inside the Windows Sidebar or separately, on the Windows desktop.

Windows Vista includes a list of eleven Sidebar gadgets: Calendar, Clock, Contacts, CPU Meter, Currency conversion, RSS Feed Headlines, Notes, Picture Puzzle, Slide Show, Stocks, and Weather. You can add new gadgets to the Windows Sidebar from the Windows Live Gallery site. There you can find a big list of additional gadgets that can be added to your Windows Sidebar.

For this article we have tested most of the gadgets available on the Windows Live Gallery and prepared a list of seven gadgets that you might consider adding to your Windows Sidebar:

Today we are very pleased to announce that our site is hosting a great collection of Windows Vista wallpapers that did not make the cut into the final Windows Vista Collection. The author of these great wallpapers is Hamad Darwish - a talented young man from Kuwait with a passion for photography.

In 2005 he was approached by Microsoft to work on the wallpaper collection for Windows Vista. From the final list of wallpapers included in Windows Vista, two of them are his work. The rest of his submissions did not make it even though some of them are just gorgeous. If you would like to know more about him and his collaboration with Microsoft you can read this interview.

In one of our previous tutorials we where showing how to configure Windows Vista to shutdown when you press the power button of your system case. Since then, many of our visitors also searched for a way to put the shut down button back on their start menu.

In this tutorial we will show you how to do that.

One of the first things I do after I install a Windows Operating System is to make sure I have access to all hidden folders and that i can see the extension for all files, including common files like ".txt" or ".doc". That is because I want to have complete access to every file or folder from my system.

To make these settings in Windows XP it was pretty easy - while I was browsing through the folders on my system, I selected Tools and then Folder Options from the top menu of Windows Explorer.

When I used Windows Vista for the first time I was a bit surprised to see that the Tools menu is nowhere to be found in Windows Explorer. So where did it go?

In this tutorial we will speak about the new graphical interface for Windows Vista. It's name is Aero and it is an acronim for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. Aero it is intended to be the most powerful, efficient and aesthetically pleasing user interface ever included in a Windows operating system.

Aero looks very good, offering new glass and translucent effects for the Windows Vista menus and desktop. All this eye candy has its costs. If you want to run Aero with full effects you will need a system that meets the following minimum requirements: 1 GHz processor, 1GB of memory and a DirectX 9 compatible video card with 128MB of memory.

However, if you do not have a very powerful system or you want to squeeze a bit of performance from your system, you can easily customize the Aero interface.

DreamScene is a tool that allows people to use videos and other optimized animations as desktop wallpapers. It is included in the Windows Ultimate Extras package and can be downloaded using the Windows Update service. At this time Microsoft released a Technical Preview version as the final product is not yet ready.

Since we launched vista4beginners.com we noticed that quite a high percentage of our visitors searched for a way to remove the arrow and the "shortcut" text from their Windows Vista shortcuts. So today we are publishing a guide on how to do just that.

Even though this is a topic for experienced users of Windows operating systems that know how to use the registry editor, we tried to make this process as simple as possible. It doesn't matter if you used the registry editor or not, just follow these steps:

One of the small but nice new things in Windows Vista is the Quick Launch Bar. It is not just a bar with nice little shortcuts on which you click, it is also a collection of quick keyboard shortcuts.