A few weeks ago we started a poll in which we asked our users if they are using Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or not. We received a total of 154 answers. Out of these, 79% of the responders said that they are using SP1 and 21% said that they are not.

Considering the fact that Windows Vista SP1 delivers a lot of improvements, it is really great to see that the big majority of our readers have adopted Service Pack 1. I'm sure that in just a few months, the percentage of people using it will get very close to 100%.

A few days ago, we were approached by Rich Robinson and asked to review his e-book called 'Windows Vista The Pocket Guide'. Since I saw other people mentioning this e-book on their sites and as we did post here book reviews in the past, I gave it a try. Despite some positive opinions that I have read about this book, I have to be honest and make a sincere statement by saying that it is far from being what other people have advertised it to be. After carefully reading it, I truly recommend everybody to stay away from it. The arguments that I will present in this article will prove that the above mentioned e-book is filled with poor tutorials, useless tips and bad or questionable advice.

Recently, Microsoft launched the Engineering Windows 7 blog in which they want to start a two-way discussion about how their engineering team is working on Windows Vista's successor - Windows 7. I believe this is a nice start and, if they keep their word, Windows 7 is expected to be one of the most exciting Windows releases ever.

Considering the fact that Windows 7 will be built on the same core architecture as Windows Vista, a good start would be to fix the main issues in Windows Vista and refine some of its unpolished features.
In order to help out the Microsoft engineering team to deliver an even better operating system, I think it would be great to have our readers point out the areas which they believe to be necessarily improved in Windows 7, starting from the experience they're having on Windows Vista.

This is our chance to make our voices heard, so... let's take advantage of it. To kick off the discussions, I will start with some of the things I believe to be worth improving in Windows 7:

In the 4th episode of our series, I would like to present to you the Windows Vista Magazine website. As you can imagine, this is the official website of the magazine with the same name. Both the site and the magazine were launched shortly before Windows Vista was launched. Since then it has cumulated lots of contents, split into the following categories: Blogs, Windows Vista Help, Guides, Shop and Message Boards.

We will continue our 'Pimp My Windows Vista' series with an article showing you how to change your logon screen. To do this, you will first need to download and install a special tool, called LogonStudio. The tool can be downloaded directly from here.

During the last few months we have been struggling with an increasing amount of spam. This caused a few problems including an important rise in resource consumption on our hosting server.
In order to tackle these problems, these days we made a few changes to our site. Except the usual Drupal engine upgrade and module update, we installed some new modules which prevent spam bots from accessing our site and verify messages to prevent spam. This led also to our Privacy Policy change.

In one of our previous articles we showed you how to install new themes in Windows Vista. If you followed all the instructions and patched your system accordingly, then you should start searching for great looking Windows Vista themes. In order to help you find them more easily, I did some digging and managed to find some nice themes you might enjoy.

I would like to continue our series with another very interesting site, called Simple Help. The site is owned by Ross McKillop and it was launched back in August of 2006. Since then, Ross has published approximately 600 tutorials split into several categories, one of them being Windows Vista. This site focuses mostly on beginner-to-intermediate computer users who want to learn how to do various things with their computers. As you will see for yourself, the quality of the articles is very good. This is why this site was already featured several times on important sites such as digg.com or LifeHacker.

The new Aero interface of Windows Vista looks really nice, but after a while you get bored of the same colors and shapes. This is why in this tutorial I will show you how to install a new theme on Windows Vista. The process is not an easy one, as we need to install some additional software, but the result will be quite satisfying.