If you have enough time at your disposal, exploring Vista is a pretty interesting experience, especially since you may bump into some strange problems, as I did. Since after a little research I discovered that the issue I encountered is a system bug, I decided to let you know more about it, too.

As you can see in the screenshot below, in my Device Manager I have an entry next to a yellow exclamation mark. This is the problem I was talking about, so let's see if you have it or not, first of all...


<-234x60 Half Banner - left->The good part is that some computers don't have this problem, and discovering the truth takes only a minute.

- First of all, press the Start Orb, type "device" in the search bar, and then click the Device Manager.


- Expand the Network adapters section and see what you got there.


- If you have an entry like the one in the screenshot above, starting with "isatap", don't try to update driver or remove it, because after the next reboot this is going to be back.

For other similar problems, try to do the following things - update the existing driver, remove the device and then scan for hardware changes, and be sure to do some research on the Internet for your problem. If you noticed this ISATAP bug on your Vista computer too, please don't forget to drop us a comment!

Unfortunately, the only thing that can be done about it, at this time, is to ignore the error message, as there is no fix announced to be on the way, because Microsoft didn't bother to fix it since March, as you can see on the official support page...

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If you want to improve the speed of your computer, minimizing the locations indexed by Vista for fast retrieval is a good idea, and since you don't need to be a computer scientist to do this, here's how it can be done...

- Press the Start Orb, type "indexing" in the search bar, and then click the highlighted item to bring up the Indexing Options window.



- In the Indexing Options window, click on Modify.


- Notice the selected locations, those that are currently being indexed. Uncheck those that you don't need. The Start Menu should be enough for most people.


- Press OK when done. There is no need to restart your computer or anything else, the changes are applied on-the-fly.


In my case, the procedure above reduced the amount of indexed items from 780 to about 120, but think about systems used by more than one user, with thousands of items listed, and the performance gain that could be achieved this way!

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One of the new games that come with Vista is called Chess Titans, and when it has its graphics settings set to the maximum, this game looks really good. Unfortunately, there is a problem! Even if you have a video card capable of running latest games on high settings, Chess Titans may start using average graphics quality. Well, since we can fix this, let's do it!

I wasn't able to test this on older video cards, but I think that even an old GeForce FX 5200 can handle the maximum settings of this game, because you don't need more than a few frames per second. After all, this is a chess game, not a first person shooter!
Anyway, here it goes...

- Press the Start Orb, type "chess" in the search bar, and then start the Chess Titans game.


<-234x60 Half Banner - left->- As you can see in the screenshot below, the graphics are not great at all(and these are the default settings on my Radeon X1950 PRO card, which isn't quite an entry level one...).


- Open the Game menu and left click the Options item. If you are in a hurry, simply press F5 and you're going to be taken straight to the Options window...


- Here, move the Graphics Quality slider to the right and press OK when done.


- Enjoy the best graphics quality possible in Chess Titans!


I am waiting for your answers, since I am really interested to see if there is any limitation for the graphics settings of this game, but I guess that any video card manufactured in the last 4 years should run it without problems at best quality possible...

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I am not crazy about having an operating system looking like a Christmas tree, but Vista's default boot screen looks really sad, if I can call it this way. Just look at the screenshot below, and you'll understand why I chose to show you how to enable a hidden boot screen that comes with Vista, but Microsoft thought you shouldn't have it as the default one...


To enable the "Aurora" boot screen, simply follow those few steps I'll describe below.

- Press the Start Orb, type "msconfig" in the search bar, and then press Enter.


- In the System Configuration window, press the Boot tab and select No GUI Boot.


- Press Apply, then hit OK, and then decide if you want to reboot to see the new boot screen right away, or leave this for a future reboot, when that time comes.


- Enjoy your new boot screen!


At last, I will state the obvious, just in case - if you want to get back to the old boot screen, simply open the System Configuration tool again, and deselect No GUI Boot. This is it!

Oh! I was just about to forget this, since Windows Defender is a program that I don't interact with too often, but... if you get an error from Windows Defender after the next reboot, you should simply enable the System Configuration tool using the tray icon to make this error disappear once and for all.

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I always wondered how it is possible for Firefox to eat a huge amount of memory and up to 60-70% of a decent CPU without browsing 10 Flash sites at once, and today I found a possible answer - it may be the prefetch feature!

This feature does nothing more than downloading various pages that you may open by clicking the links located on the page you are currently visiting, trying to predict your browsing behaviour. Anyway, we're here to disable it, not to get to know it better, so let's get down to business, shall we?

- If Firefox is not open already, open it and type "about:config" in the address bar, followed by the Enter key.


- Type "network.prefetch-next" into the Filter bar, so that we can see only the option we need to change.


- Double click the highlighted field to change its value from "true" to "false".


This is it! As easy as it gets, don't you think? Try this for yourselves and don't forget to let us know if this trick improved your Firefox experience or not. Anyway, if you're not happy with the changes, simply go through the steps above once more to get back to the default setting.

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