One of the best tips i have learned since the beginning of my career in IT is to never keep my personal files and folders (such as My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc) in their default locations. In Windows Vista, all the personal folders are stored on the drive where the operating system is installed. For example, if your user is called "George" and you installed Windows Vista on the "C:" drive, your personal files and folders will be stored by default in "C:\Users\George\". By leaving them in their default location, each time you have problems with the operating system there is a risk that you might lose them. If something happens and you need to format the "C:" drive that means all your documents, music, pictures, etc will be lost.

To avoid such problems you can always move them and store everything on a separate partition. This way, you can format the "C:" drive and reinstall the operating system how many times you need without risking your data. As a general advice, it is always better to keep on your "C:" drive only the operating system and the applications you use. All of your data, including documents or saved games should be kept on a separate partition.

In this tutorial we will show you how to move your personal files and folders to other partitions.

Some people might have problems reading the text of the icons and menus in Windows Vista. The font size can be too small and making it bigger might help. Windows Vista gives users the possibility to make the text and other items easier to see by making them larger.
This can be done by increasing the so called Dots per inch scale or DPI. To adjust it, just follow the steps outlined below.

In simple words, Virtual Memory is system memory that is simulated by the operating system and it is placed on your hard drive. It combines your computer's RAM with temporary space on your disk. When your PC runs low on RAM, virtual memory moves data from RAM to a space called the paging file or swap file. Moving the data frees up your RAM and your applications can continue to run without crashes.

If you don't have too much RAM installed on your system it can be a good a idea to increase the size of your virtual memory. If you are like me, you might still want to configure the size of the swap/paging file or it's location, even if your PC has plenty of RAM available.

As you will see, configuring the virtual memory in Windows Vista is easy. Just follow these steps:

One of the small but annoying things in Windows Vista is the fact that the System Beep is enabled by default. Every time you encounter an error or you click through the menus of applications such as the AVG antivirus, you will hear a beep. In the beginning you might ignore it but after a while it becomes very annoying.

For those of you who want to get rid of the beep, in this tutorial we will show how to disable it.

On the internet you can find lots of information about the Windows Experience Index. You can find a lot of guides presenting this feature, how it works and how to increase your system ratings. Unfortunately, another similar feature has passed almost unnoticed. It is called the System Stability Index and it allows users to evaluate the stability of their systems and to make informed decisions about how to troubleshoot. The System Stability Index is a number from 1 (least stable) to 10 (most stable) and is a weighted measurement derived from the number of specified failures seen over a rolling historical period.

In this article we will show you how to access the System Stability Index of your Windows Vista PC and how to access the information you need regarding the failures that might take place.

When changing operating systems and migrating data, you might end up not being able to access some of your files or folders anymore. This can happen due to the fact that your user has lost ownership of those files & folders or it no longer has the required permissions. In this tutorial will try to address this type of issues and help our readers that reported having such problems.

Even though the procedure is a bit long, you will see that things are not very complicated.

Like most computer professionals, I always try to find tweaks that improve the speed of my system or, at least, some usability aspects. In Windows XP, one of my favorite tweaks is one that enables the "Copy To Folder" and "Move To Folder" options in the right click menu. After using Windows Vista for a few weeks I tried this "trick" and I was glad to see that it still working.

Recently we have received e-mails from our readers asking us to help them customize or restore their standard desktop icons. In order to answer their questions and also help other people having the same "problems", we decided to publish this article. We will show you how to customize the list of standard icons shown on the desktop, how to change their icons and how to restore the originals, in case you want the standard icons back.

We mentioned in our previous article that Instant Search uses an index to return the results of your searches as quickly as possible. The index is like a library that stores information about files, including the file name, the date it was modified and properties such as author, tags or rating. Instead of looking through your entire hard disk for a file name, Instant Search scans the index, which allows most results to appear in a small fraction of the time that a search without the index would have taken. By default, Instant Search indexes only a small number of folders such as the Start Menu, the names of the files opened, the Documents folder and the user's e-mail.

The index can be customized by the user at any time. You can remove locations or file types from the index in order to make Instant Search even faster or you can add even more locations or files types. In this article we will show you how you can configure the Windows Vista index to your liking.