Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Improve Vista’s interface
Alex Watson
For all its flashiness, Vista’s UI can be a distinctly underwhelming and irritating experience. Having installed Vista on my work machine, making it a better working environment has been something of a priority for me. Over the last few months, I’ve got Vista to a point where it’s no longer irritating and actually offers some real improvements over XP. I thought I’d list some of these hints and tips together in a blog post.
1. The first step to a better Vista is to do something about User Account Control, aka UAC. If you’ve ever taken a car journey with a hyperactive five year old, UAC will be extremely familiar, although instead of the constant stream of ‘are we there yet, are-we-there-yet, arewethreyet’, you get a constant stream of ‘are you sure, are you sure you’re sure?’ type dialogue boxes asking you to approve hundreds of actions - including ones you set in motion. You can simply turn UAC off (Control Panel > UAC), but then you’re missing out on some of its security benefits; another option is to use the nifty Tweak UAC utility, which supresses a lot of its moaning so you can just get on with the stuff you need to.
2. Dealing with UAC makes Vista a significantly more placid environment to work in, but you can cut the noise and clutter even further by switching the taskbar to the top of the screen.
Right click on it, untick ‘Lock the taskbar’, drag it to the top of the screen and lock it there. As this blog post by IA Japan points out, Microsoft largely seems to have stuck to having a pop-up menu in the bottom left of the screen and the clock in the bottom right because that’s what they’ve been doing since Win95. IA’s post claims that it’s natural for us to look at a screen by beginning at the top (a visual art theory), but I’ve actually found the reason having the taskbar at the top works is that it’s out of the way. My natural method of looking seems to be tilted slightly down, so having the taskbar at the top means it interferes less with what I’m actually working on.
3. Make use of Favorite Links. This Vista feature has basically been nicked from Finder in Mac OS X -but this is not a bad thing as it’s very useful and fairly logical to boot. In every standard folder window in Vista, there’s a column on the left hand side; it can display a tree view of folders along with ‘Favorite links’. By default these are links to places such as Documents, Music and Pictures - but you can drag links to any location in there to create a quick way to access places you regular work in. As you can see from my screenshot above, I’ve got links to the ‘Issues’ folder on my hard disk and on the server, which are the two folders I do most work out of and need most of my files in.
4. Make ALT-Tab better. Running just one application is something of a rarity these days, so it’s important that the OS allows you to shuttle easily between programs. OS X has Expose, an excellent little feature that tiles all open windows so you can easily see what’s happened. Vista has Flip 3D, which shows you everything like a deck of cards. It’s hopeless and disorientating. Vista’s simpler ALT-Tab feature is actually pretty good. Unlike in XP, you can navigate in any direction around the ALT-Tab display using the cursor keys, and you don’t just get icons, you get actual images of the software. Problem is, the ALT-Tab display doesn’t scale with screen size, so it’s a bit too small - until you get stuck into Vista’s guts. You can download a registry hack to enlarge ALT-Tab from here (although the technique was originally outlined by David Nicholson on his blog). By default the registry hack is set with the values suited to a 1,680 x 1,050 desktop, but the forum thread lists the quick edits you can make so it’s suitable for other screen sizes.
5. Download Launchy, and get it configured for power use. Seriously, Launchy is brilliant, as you may have heard me say before. It’s a command line interface that’s a lot like having a Google search bar for your PC. Think of something you want - an app, a file, a folder - type in the first few letters, and up it comes. It needs configuring, but that’s fairly easy: once installed, open it up, and right click on its border; select the directories option from the menu, and add the folders that contain stuff you need access too - Program Files, documents etc. In the right hand column, where the file types which Launchy should index are listed, add in .directory (to enable Launchy to index directories as well as files), along with extensions such as .doc, .rtf, .xls, .txt, .exe - whatever you work with most.
Once you’ve got Launchy indexing all the stuff you need, you can expand its powers (links are in this previous post) - particularly useful is the batch file hack that enables you to use Launchy to fire text into a txt file; ideal for not letting yourself get distracted from a big task if you happen to have a thought you need to remember in the middle of it.
6. Minimise the crap loading at start-up. The excellent Msconfig utility works just as well in Vista as it did in XP. Click the Windows button, type msconfig into the box and then choose the start-up tab. Ditch the rubbish that’s slowing down your PC’s start-up times by unticking the various box. As Jeff Atwood mentions in his comprehensive post about this on Coding Horror, you should also minimise the number of times you boot the PC anyway - Vista has decent hibernation and sleep modes.
7. 2GB of RAM. Yeah, not such a free and easy tip, but there’s no getting away from it - two gigs rocks in Vista. Four is overkill, especially if you’re on the 32-bit version of Vista, as due to the limits of the maths, it can only address 3.12GB of physical memory. Fortunately, the advent of DDR3 means DDR2 (and even original DDR) prices have really dropped.
Actually, I find the window key tab thing in vista to be very useful. The alt tab thing is just a bit too boring and samey as Xp, and the windows flip 3d is really fun. Its only disorentating the first one or two times that you use it, and displays the actaul screen in a bigger format and a better way than alt tab. Its one of the few things that Microsft got very well done about windows vista.
Good stuff, mind you I have 4GB installed with Vista 32-bit and it displays 3.24GB which is useful, as I give 600MB each to two virtual linux SMP machines to do some folding at home for team Custom PC, leaving me with about 2GBs for Vista itself - so not a total waste with 4GB.
Nice tips Alex, but I’m still not convinced it’s Vista time 
@Steven Jones - well, the next issue’s Vista vs XP thing isn’t going to do much to convince you either, Steven! Unfortunately, I “upgraded” my installation of XP to Vista, so had no choice but to learn to live with it!
I’m still not convinced about Vista totally. I’ve had sales people try to convince me that i’d benefit my work but they just keep repeating the ‘increase your productivity’ and ‘improvements over xp’ mantras but aren’t able to convince me of what these improvements are so I’d probably be more tmepted to go with XP64 if pushed since it doesn’t have the RAM size temper-tantrums vista has.
I’d also say 4Gb is no way overkill for 64bit OS’s. no need for a page file is one benefit and the work I do it would be handy to have 4-8gb for things like video encoding/editing and rendering but the launchy prog seems interesting, I’ll give it a go 
Made the leap to Vista and I have to say I don’t see any reason to jump back to XP.
Everything I had running in XP runs perfectly well with Vista. A lot of the naggling third party software problems seem to have been dealt with quite nicely by Vista.
All the doom and gloom about drivers not being available to Vista is pure scare tactics from the “we hate change” brigade.
Even the hardware not supposedly able to be run on Vista worked fine installing the XP drivers.
I know we will hear the odd few spoating “I tried to install my XXX and it wouldn’t work, so Vista is crap”
I suggest they go back and try now because so many have gone back and created new drivers for Vista now.
Vista is the future and many new hardware and software updates will start to filter out the “old timers” not wanting to move on.
Let the flaming begin!!
XP does everything vista does but faster! works with more programs and is just as secure. Thhe only benifits of vista are the media center and the flashy interface other then that there is no reason to upgrade. If it aint broke dont fix it!
what key issues of vista interface design?
That sprite is from Xmen vs Street Fighter, Apocalypses sprite
@lol - Ahh, you’d think so, but it’s actually part of an illustration we had specially commissioned for our XP vs Vista feature. Bit SF II and all those 2D fighters were definitely the inspiration