After years of using Windows XP, most people (including myself) got bored with the standard startup sound. This is the reason why, after a while, I chose to disable it. With the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft wanted to bring a new startup sound. So they hired a team of 20 composers, sound designers, engineers, and developers to create the new Windows Vista startup sound. It took them 18 months and 500 entries from which the final sound was picked and embedded in Windows Vista.

Even though the new startup sound is pretty good, just like with any other new thing, it will become old after a while and people will get bored with it and will probably choose to disable it.

Nowadays, SATA hard disk drives are very common. They offer a series of advantages compared to older models, one of them being the improved performance. Windows Vista not only offers built-in support for SATA hard disks, but it also allows you to squeeze a little more performance from them.

So... how do you increase the performance of your SATA hard disk?

One of the biggest changes in Windows Vista is the complete redesign of the Start Menu. While this change is a good thing for some people, others prefer to use the old style Start Menu. In this tutorial we will show you how to enable and configure the classic version of the Start Menu.

The procedure is very simple. Just follow these steps:

System Restore is a very useful feature of Windows Vista but it has one main drawback. After running for a few weeks, it can use a lot of your hard disk space. With the default settings turned on, System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. For example, if you have a 250GB hard disk drive, System Restore might end up using 37,5GB of it. That is a lot of space.

What can we do to limit the amount of space used by System Restore? In Windows XP making this kind of configuration was pretty easy. You had a slider in the System Properties window that you could move left or right to the desired percentage. Unfortunately this slider was removed from Windows Vista.

In order to configure the amount of space used by System Restore, you need to use a tool called Volume Shadow Copy Administrative Command-Line Tool (or vssadmin.exe).

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.

Since we launched vista4beginners.com we noticed that quite a high percentage of our visitors searched for a way to remove the arrow and the "shortcut" text from their Windows Vista shortcuts. So today we are publishing a guide on how to do just that.

Even though this is a topic for experienced users of Windows operating systems that know how to use the registry editor, we tried to make this process as simple as possible. It doesn't matter if you used the registry editor or not, just follow these steps:

One of the small but nice new things in Windows Vista is the Quick Launch Bar. It is not just a bar with nice little shortcuts on which you click, it is also a collection of quick keyboard shortcuts.

When you press the power button of your Windows Vista PC, you will see that it doesn’t shut down by default. Windows Vista makes the system enter into sleep mode. This mode allows you to restart your PC and log back to Windows Vista very quickly.

However, there are people who prefer to shut down their systems when pressing the power button. In this tutorial we will show you how to change what the power button does.

One of the most visible changes in Windows Vista is the complete redesign of the Control Panel. Lots of things were moved and now you have very easy access to some configuration options while others seem to be hidden deep in the Control Panel menus.

If you have a hard time finding things, don't worry. Windows Vista gives you the option to switch back to the old Control Panel and this is how you do it: