There are two new
power buttons on the Windows Vista start menu that behave differently
than in previous versions of Windows. The main button, that looks like
a power button actually puts your computer to sleep, not really turning
it completely off. The other button locks your computer. I personally
do not like putting my computer to sleep. I would rather turn it off
completely to save some power and save some money on my electric bill
when I am sleeping.

Follow the steps below to customize these button to work how you want them to work:

1. Click on the Start Menu and type in Power Options and hit Enter.
2. Click on Choose what power buttons do on the side menu.
3. Configure the buttons.
4. Hit Save Changes.

Well for the first time in my life I decided to take control of working our budget here at home instead of letting Mark do it all I approached it somewhat vigorously, because I knew by doing this I would help get alot of the stress of his shoulders, and to that extent it has worked out. So Here’s what I did.

First I created a google calendar and decided to plan out how much we needed to take out of each check every week to put towards bills. I planned it all out pretty well actually and looking over the finished product I was quite proud of myself.

Secondly I went and bought a binder and some folders. A Folder for each bill the bills being Rent, Cable (which actually is three bills rolled into one ie.. cable, phone, and internet) a folder for gas and electric, and another for our credit card bill.

Inside each one I put post-it notes on how much was needed for what dates. Needless to say this actually worked out quite well as it only took as a month to get financially back on track. So from now On I think I’ll be using this tatic with the bills I recommend it to anyone who feels like they are always living from paycheck to paycheck as now we actully have a few extra dollars come pay day it’s quite a nice change…

One of the most commonly asked questions about vista is “How the hell do I disable the User account control On vista?!?!” You would be surprised at how easy it is do do this. I’ll outline the process below.

1. Logon to your windows vista desktop (a given)

2. Open your start menu and select Control Panel

3. Select User Accounts and Family Safety

4. Select User Accounts

5. Click Turn User Account Control On Or Off

6. Uncheck “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer”

7. Click OK

8. You’ll now be prompted to reboot your computer so that the changes can take affect.

Thats pretty much it. Very easy to remedy in about 15 seconds. Now you’ll no longer have that annoying permissions dialogue popping up all the time. This doesn’t disable windows defender either which will still be running.

I hope this helps!

(Full credit for this article goes to My Digital Life Blog )

Windows DreamScene (also Motion Desktop) is a nice extra feature
that plays high definition video content or movie as desktop background
with animated wallpaper instead of static graphic. Unfortunately, Microsoft only offers the feature to Windows Vista Ultimate users for free download.
But it

Ok I’ll be the first to say that Microsoft is greedy, I mean all one has to do is look at the way they try to rake in money with the Xbox to see that. That being said and having read article after article on people debating the good the bad and the ugly of Windows vista I must say I have a few opinions myself on it.

As You can see they aren’t bad systems

Common Discussions & Improvements

One of the most commonly discussed vista facts is the new User Account Control system (aka UAC). Some like it Most find it annoying We both found it annoying so I quickly did a google search and learned how to disable it. The UAC is a dialouge that pops up in vista aking for your permission to do pretty much anything even if your account in an administrator account. However as I said you can disable that annoying little pop up, by simply going into the control panel and turning the option off in User accounts.

Another “commonly” discussed fact is the system requirements of windows vista. Something That I really haven’t noticed a difference of on my 2 year old computer (which is practically ancient in computer years). I would go so far as to say my computer seems faster epsecially since I’m using the 64 bit edition as opposed to the 32 bit.

The graphics on vista are quite a treat if your into eye candy (and yes I am). Not to mention the way they use the Icons to actually tell you about a file. For instance now when I open my computer and see my hard drives I’m actually given the amount of space available graphically. There is now also a handy slider to allow me to make my icons detailed or if I want extremly large. The extremely large feature is quite nice if you have a lot of pictures to go through or wallpapers. Because now you don’t have to separately preview every one you want to look at or try to guess what it is from some tiny little thumbnail.

Another handy feature is the Favorites sidebar You can easily drag and drop folders you frequently use onto this bar and it creates nice little shortcuts to them for you. If your like me and spend alot of time working with folders this nice little feature is something I wont be giving up any time soon. One click folder links are indeed a god-send.

Another thing about vista that I like is how updates can be handled. Now I can run the windows updater program and then instead of being annoyed every 5 minutes once the updates are installed I can opt to wait up to 4 hours before being reminded that I need to reboot to finish the update.

Built in Speech recognition is another neat addition to vista, after just a few mouse clicks I found myself ordering my computer around with a microphone. Something I never thought I would be able to do. I actually wrote a whole forum post by talking to my computer. (A somewhat strange albeit kewl feeling).

Biggest Complaints

Actually I would have to say that my biggest complaint about vista is not actually a vista problem at but a 3rd party problem. It’s the lack of support for 64 bit systems in software. The fact that Mark and I love to be able to customize our interfaces has never really been a problem since we discovered Object Desktop. However now That I’m using a 64 bit system there are some components of object desktop which don’t work with it, such as Icon Packager a program to change all the icons on your system, while it works perfectly fine on Marks 32 bit system. My Most importent software the ones which really concerned me however, were my web server, mysql database server, ftp server and mail server, All which run without a hitch.

In this household we play alot of computer games, one of the major games is Battlefield 2. Right after upgrading I launched my game and began to logon to a server to play only find that I was getting kicked for having insuffecient OS privleges. This however was easily remedied by updating the games punkbuster version, one simple small download. The rest of my games however (Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Zoo Tycoon 2 SIMS 2, Age of mythology..etc…etc..etc..) all work fine I’v had no crashes of any kind. The black and blue screens of death have officially become obsolete. I can also run my classic games without a problem, such as an old typing tutor that was designed for windows 95.

The only other problem that occurred and I really wouldn’t call this a problem was that I had to download updated audio and video drivers for my computer. But they were easy enough to find and install.

Final Words

Windows Vista is different, it’s not XP nor is it meant to be. As with any new operating system there are bound to be bugs and things which need to be changed or even re-evaluated during the initial release period. Most of the people complaining about Vista were probably complaining about XP when it was first released as well. Change can be scary especially in a tech environment. But I think that once the first service pack comes out and more people delve into actually giving it a fair chance it will come to be appreciated in the same manner which XP has. After using Vista for the past 3 months I really don’t think there is anyway in which I could return to XP and still have the same feelings about it. Things that were a pain in XP have become easier to do in Vista Such as resizing a partition (something you need 3rd party software for in XP) or Assigning a drive letter to a network folder which takes two clicks on a one dialog box. If you give it half a chance you might find you actually like Vista. So before you began casting judgments based on other peoples opinions just remember what they say about opinions, they are like assholes everybody has one

Kenzie is doing quite well at school I would have to say he has adjusted very nicely to being in a new home and a new school. His first term grades are all A’s and B’s with the exception of One C. He’s also become involved in a few extra curricular activies. He’s gotten involved in what they call Hawk T.V. this is a t.v. program produced by students for the school He really seems to like it alot. His other activity is wrestling. He hasn’t had a meet yet the first one will be on the 28th of November. He really enjoy’s it. We plan on video taping the meet and I’ll post it as soon as possible.

He also went to his first school dance on the 2nd of November. Which like most middle school dances was mostly groups of girls and guys going togather and hanging out not really any dating going yet…lol. That’s not to say he doesn’t look at the girls because he’s definatly been looking. He had fun though he and his friends hung out for most of the night.

Conferences are next week and I’m not quite sure how they work it as I haven’t heard anything about being scheduled a meeting so I’m going to call there tomorrow and see what they tell me. But other than that everything is great. Mark and I are so proud of him, he’s really doing well for himself.

Kenzie did excellent on his spelling this week, we actually changed tatics on how we approached it. From now on I print out a list of 10 words, he is responsible for looking up the definitions and study them during the week and then on Sunday he gets quizzed where he has to spell the word, use it in a sentence and write the definition. This seems to work out a lot better for him. His words for this week were:

• Economize
• Brandish
• Hierarchical
• Eclectic
• Verbatim
• Technology
• Malfunction
• Extension
• Theatrical
• Surmise

He got a 100% on the quiz . The one thing he does need to focus on is his penmanship, I’m hoping by having him write out the definitions this will improve. Ive discussed it with him and told him that he really needs to work on it. So we’ll see how it looks next Sunday.

Kenzie Started School today, and he seemed to really like it. I’m glad I was nervous for him. Jr. High is a big transition from elementary school. It seems this school is pretty big about making the kids take responsibility for themselves something I think most schools should focus on. Tomorrow he’s going to check out an after school activity they do called Hawk T.V. Where the kids learn to make a t.v. program which is played for the entire school every two weeks. You check out the program details here.

In light of the fact the we feel school should be his main focus we have decided to not do math at home during the school year, however he will still be learning a new word every day, as I feel it’s important to broaden his vocabulary. I’ll be posting the words from the previous each Sunday, so you can check them out.

Kenzie is doing much better at math, we had a 25 problem worksheet which had 3 digit Multiplication problems on it. When he first began doing the worksheet he was missing 2 out of 3 on the first try now he’s reversed that, he’s been getting 2 out of three correctly on the first and normally just by double checking the one he misses he can figure out what he did wrong. He’s been working quite hard to get better at the math and we’re both very proud of him.

School starts on Tuesday, and we went to the open house last Wednesday, his teachers all seemed very nice, and he’s looking forward to starting. I posted some of the school papers in his section. He seems to be interested in wrestling which starts in the second quarter of the school year.

My First lessons have been posted on the G.E.D. Site and I’ll be concentrating on getting that done. Maybe between the two of us we can actually get somewhere .