Why one should use Windows Media Center? The answer is simple: because Music, Pictures and Videos are more than just files!

To explain things better, I will start by briefly describing a typical scenario: you take 200 photos on a weekend trip, you download all of your favorite music and videos and you collect huge numbers of mp3 files. What happens to them? They all end up in folders, on a partition of your hard drive and most of the times you can't remember where they were. Windows Media Center can help you find them. In this article I will present the most important features and issues of Windows Media Center, which is intended to be an important Windows Vista tool for organizing and accessing media files.

For the moment, I will resume the presentation only to the Local Media features, like the Pictures, Videos and Music Libraries. The other features (TV and Movies, Sports and Online Media) will be presented in a forthcoming article.

One of the applications which changed quite a lot in Windows Vista, compared to Windows XP, is Windows Firewall. There are a number of new features which make it a much more reliable solution which offers a decent protection level. Unfortunately, until now we did not get the chance to feature Windows Firewall on our site. I would like to use this article and show you the following: how to find the Windows Firewall, how to use it, how to access and change defined exceptions and how to select the network connections that are protected by Windows Firewall.

Windows Journal is one of the applications designed for Tablet PCs. Users can handwrite notes and draw lines or shapes with it. Even though it is recommended to use a graphics tablet or a Tablet PC, you can compose handwritten notes using a normal mouse. However, this can be quite uncomfortable. In this article I will show you where to find and how to use Windows Journal.

Windows Movie Maker is one of the applications that have not been changed much since Windows XP. The new version includes relatively minor updates such as: new effects, new transitions and support for the DVR-MS file format which is used in Windows Media Center to record television. In Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate, Windows Movie Maker offers as an additional feature the capacity to capture video from HDV camcorders. Another difference, compared to the older version from Windows XP is the fact that it no longer supports importing video from analog video sources such as web-cameras.

Sound Recorder is a very simple application that allows users to record and save sound on their computers. Recording sound is very easy: all you need is a sound card and a microphone that is plugged into it. By default, the recorded sounds will be saved as a Windows Media Audio (WMA) file.

The difference between photos and photos you like often depends on the tools you are using. Windows Photo Gallery is a complete photo management tool that is included in all versions of Windows Vista. It allows users to organize their pictures collection, tag them, rate them and even edit them. The editing features are pretty basic (resizing, cropping, red-eye reduction, etc) but also very useful.
In this article you will find a video showing all of Windows Photo Gallery's features and how to work with it so that you effectively manage your pictures collection.

One of our readers asked us to create a tutorial about the Check Disk tool in Windows Vista. Even though nothing has changed about this tool since Windows XP, we decided to create such a tutorial and make sure all our readers understand what this tool does and how to use it.

Basically, Check Disk is a tool that verifies your disks for file system integrity, locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. This can be very helpful when you have some form of hardware failure which affects the integrity of your files. Unless you have some serious hardware problems, Check Disk can help you recover corrupted information from your hard disk, floppy disk or memory stick.

One of the novelties in Windows Vista is the inclusion of the Windows Network Diagnostic tool. This tool can help you identify and resolve with ease most of your network problems. You don't have to be a specialist in computer networks to find out what is wrong with your network or internet connection. You just run the tool and it will report to you the problems that were discovered.

In this tutorial we will show how to use Windows Network Diagnostics to successfully identify connectivity problems.