As its name suggests, ITsVista.com is a web destination dedicated to Windows Vista. The website was started in December 2006, just a bit before we launched Windows Vista for Beginners. The person behind this website is Joseph Fieber, a very friendly computer enthusiast with whom we collaborated in a few occasions.
When browsing this website, you will find the following categories: Tips and Tricks, Windows Updates & Hotfixes (with complete descriptions and links for direct downloads), Knowledge Base Links to articles describing known Windows Vista errors, a complete list of Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts, information about Windows Vista's Services and Commands, a few Product Reviews, a Glossary of terms explaining many abbreviations you might encounter while working with Windows Vista and a collection of Videos and Web Links.
If you have visited our site in the last few days, I'm sure you noticed the new Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 logo. On the 17th of June 2008, Mozilla has officially launched the 3rd version of their famous Firefox browser. To celebrate this launch, Mozilla has planned to set the Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. In order to help them achieve this goal, I would like to share with you some of the reasons for which you should download and install this great piece of software right-away.
In case you were wondering how are we doing this year, here you have our site's traffic details for the period March 1st - May 31st. As you can see from the screenshots below, we had a total of 377400 visits and 892637 pageviews which means an average of 2.37 Pages/Visit. We were not very satisfied with the number of average pages per visit from our first months of existence so we made a number of tweaks which seem to have payed off. Also, we managed to increase the average time spent on site from 01:43 minutes to 02:22 minutes.
When Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released in March, many users were not able to install it via Windows Update due to the fact that it wasn't included in the list of available updates. That happened because of several reasons, the most common of them being incompatible drivers with SP1. Even though the list of incompatible drivers was relatively small, Creative drivers for Audigy or older models of sound cards were on it. So, if you are the owner of an older Creative sound card this is most likely the reason why SP1 is still not available as an update via Windows Update.
The bad news is that even after two months since SP1 is available, Creative has not yet launched updated drivers. The good news is that a passionate modder - Daniel Kawakami (Daniel_K) from Brazil - has released his own version of drivers which work on Windows Vista SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit). In this article you will learn what drivers you need to download and where you can find them.
A while back, we decided to remove our Links section and start reviewing the best How-To destinations on the web. We thought this would bring more value to both our readers and the sites we choose for reviewing. I would like to initiate this series with one of the sites I read regularly via my RSS feed reader: the How-To Geek. On this site you will find plenty of tutorials, the blogs of the people who write most of the site content, a freshly started How-To Wiki and a pretty active forum.
Note stickers are one of the most useful things ever created. We use them to remind ourselves or others of future chores, ideas that are worth remembering, etc. The problem people might have when using note stickers is that the working space can become rather messy and finding a previous note can become time consuming. This can be easily fixed with the help of virtual note stickers programs. Shock Sticker is a free virtual note sticker application. This program helps you easily create note stickers, memos and can also be used as a scheduler. It also has some other additional functions such as: alarm, password, and hiding features.
JPG or JPEG is probably the most used file format for images. From the internet to the most common mobile phone camera, we are all surrounded by them. We use them very often because they are small and easy to transfer. However, small size means also lower quality. Depending on how you create or modify a JPEG file, you might end-up having a low-quality image. Unless you use the right tools, quality remains lost forever. The good news is that there is a tool that can fix such problems.
Jpeg Enhancer is an application produced by a company called VicMan Software. This free tool fixes JPEG/JPG images that suffer from low-quality compression or are prone to have a "blotchy look". It doesn’t use any blur effects to hide noise in the image, but instead it uses a series of smart techniques to restore images back to their true form.
One of the things we would like to improve this year is the number of articles published per week. Right now we are not posting more than 2-3 articles in a week and we want to do more. In order to achieve such a goal we definitely need more volunteers willing to write with us. So, if you wrote one useful tutorial, a nice review, etc and you want to have it published on our site, don't hesitate to contact us. We are very open to any type of collaboration.
Also, if you are a site administrator and you would like to get some link-love, you can publish an article on our site and also post some links back to your site(s).
On our site you can find a lot of articles with tips & tricks about how to speed up Windows Vista and how to have an enjoyable computer experience. One way to have a fast system is to keep it as "clean" as possible: with very little space occupied by temporary or unused files and with little or no invalid registry keys.
One way to achieve this is to use Disk Cleanup. However, this tool can clean only files and not registry keys. A better solution is to use CCleaner - a freeware optimization tool that cleans-up all unnecessary files & invalid registry keys.