One of the greatest thing about Windows Vista™ is its looks. When you start it for the first time it certainly has some of the "Wow" factor Microsoft is talking about in its commercials. When you compare it to the previous Windows operating systems, the Windows Vista desktop looks really great. Even so, people will surely get bored by all the eye candy after a while.

So, what do you do when you get bored with the looks of your operating system? You do what MTV does - you PIMP it!

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:

In the last few days Creative quietly released new versions of their Windows Vista drivers for their line of sound cards. We rushed to the download page and installed the new versions. After testing the drivers on our Audigy 2 ZS sound cards and reading the release notes we noticed that there is little improvement compared to the old beta versions.

According to Windows Help and Support, a restore point is a representation of a stored state of your computer's system files. Restore points are created by System Restore at specific intervals and when System Restore detects the beginning of a change to your computer. If no important system changes are made, restore points are created once per day.

However, there are cases in which you might need to change the creation of restore points frequency on your computer. To do that, you need to use the Registry Editor and edit the value of a key called RPGlobalInterval that can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore.

If you are not very familiar with the Windows registry and you are not very sure on what you are doing, you might have problems when changing settings in the Windows Registry. This is why we created a tool called CSRF (Change System Restore Frequency).

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.

A few days ago we published a guide on how to disable the User Account Control feature in Windows Vista. Disabling this feature can bring less frustration when doing administrative tasks on your computer but at the same time exposes your system to a number of security threats.

While browsing the internet, we managed to find a free software tool that allows you to fine tune UAC. It is called TweakUAC and you can find it here.

Today we would like to inaugurate a new section of our website. Here you will find articles and opinions about Windows Vista. Also, we will try to present free or open source applications that are made for Windows Vista.

For our first article we have a list of 10 free applications that work on Windows Vista, split into these categories: Antivirus Solutions, Anti-Spyware Solutions, Internet Browsers, Multimedia Players, Office Productivity Suites and Compression Tools.