The Windows Security Center was first included in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Its main purpose is to provide the ability to view and change the status of computer security settings and services. Even though it looks the same, Windows Security Center evolved a bit in Windows Vista.

Now the Security Center monitors a wider variety of settings and informs the user if there is a problem. In this guide we will show you how to configure it.

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.

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.

All modern processors have built-in power management features that allow you to lower the costs of your power bills. For their latest processors, AMD developed a technology called Cool'n'Quiet and Intel another one called SpeedStep. Both of them dynamically adjust the voltage and the core frequency of your processor, decreasing the average power consumption and average heat production.

Our systems are based on AMD processors and, after we installed Windows Vista, we tried to find Cool'n'Quiet drivers for it. We were surprised to see that there are none available on the AMD site. That's because Windows Vista has built-in power management features that do no require additional drivers.

To enable these features you must create or select an appropriate power plan. Just follow these steps:

The old Volume Control from Windows XP was replaced in Windows Vista by the Volume Mixer. The new application brings to Windows Vista much more flexibility regarding the sound management of the different applications you have installed on your PC. In Windows XP the only feature of the Volume Control was to increase or decrease the general system sound level. In Windows Vista, the Volume Mixer is capable of managing sound settings for each multimedia application installed on your PC.

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.

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?

UAC or User Access Control is a new feature of Windows Vista that is meant to enhance the security of your system. Each time an application is installed or whenever an important system change is made by the user or by a running process, the screen is blacked out and temporarily disabled and a dialog is shown with the choices to allow or deny the action.

If the logged user is not an administrator, Windows Vista will also ask for the administrator password. While this helps keeping your system safer from threats, it can also be very annoying and sometimes confusing.

In this guide we will show you how to disable this feature of Windows Vista. Before we start, we must remind you that disabling UAC is not recommended by Microsoft because it can expose you to a lot more security threats. If you still choose to disable it please make sure you have proper security in place for your system.