One of the most important features of modern browsers is the possibility to extend their default functionality using add-ons to integrate new features that satisfy different browsing needs. Internet Explorer 8 delivers the possibility to extend the default functionality much more than Internet Explorer 7 did with its add-ons. Internet Explorer 8 allows you to use more types of add-ons such as: toolbars, extensions, accelerators, web slices or additional search engines.

In this article I will share with you the best add-ons for Internet Explorer 8 that we could find a few weeks after its launch.

Firefox 3 has been our browser of choice since its June 2008 launch. In this article, I will share with you a list of useful extensions each beginner should install & use. As you will see for yourself, they will greatly improve your browsing experience by providing additional features which cannot be found in Internet Explorer.

Back in the summer of 2007, we started a small series of interviews entitled "Getting to know the Microsoft enthusiasts". Up until now we interviewed five people, all of them passionate bloggers about Windows Vista and Microsoft products, bloggers which help people by writing great tutorials and finding solutions to computing problems. The folks from The WinVista Club have decided to interview the interviewer, and they have published an interview with me.

This year we continue our series of interviews with a very special guest: Vishal Gupta, the man behind AskVG.com. Vishal is one of the most well known Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals on the internet, author of great themes for Windows Vista and writer of countless tutorials about Windows. His site won last year the "The Best Windows Vista Website 2008" competition, a competion where our site won third place. If you want to know more about him on a more personal level, check out our interview.

Lots of people are having problems with their computers and many of them are caused by the applications they have installed. Some hate the fact that, all of a sudden, their documents are opened with another application instead of Word, or their movies are opened by some other application instead of the one they are used to. Others have problems with their browser not working properly due to some strange toolbars. Others receive lots of annoying messages at startup. All these kinds of problems are caused by the fact that, when installing applications, many people blindly click on the Next button until the installation ends. In this article I will give you five reasons why doing this is a very bad practice which leads to countless problems. Hopefully, I will manage to convince you to stop for a few seconds and read the windows & messages you receive during the installation of any application.

At the beginning of 2009 I've decided to migrate to Windows Vista 64-bit and take advantage of the additional features and improvements. Although some people say that the 64-bit version is not ready for mainstream usage yet, after using it for two weeks and running some benchmarks I must say that this is not true. In this article I will give you an overview of what it means to upgrade to Windows Vista 64-bit. I will present the benefits and limitations introduced by Windows Vista 64-bit, the things you should pay attention to before upgrading, the gain in performance and my user experience since working with it.

Another year has passed and our site is almost two years old. 2008 has been a good year for us in many ways, with its share of success, failures and lessons learned. Today, I will tell you about 2008 and what it has meant for the Windows Vista for Beginners team.

Our team has talked a lot in our previous articles about Disk Defragmenter and the changes introduced in Windows Vista and Service Pack 1. In this article, I would like to measure how system performance is affected by the defragmentation process. Basically, I want to find out what is the performance hit on your system while this tool is running and defragmenting your data. To see the results and conclusions of my analysis click on read more.

Our friends from The WinVista Club have recently released a nice little tool called Ultimate Windows Tweaker. As you can imagine, the tool allows you to tweak lots of aspects in Windows Vista. For a complete list of available tweaks (over 130 in total), check out the tweaks page.