Although I'm late to the party in reviewing Windows Vista SP1, it's becoming widely available as I write this, so now is as good a time as any for my review. Rather than try to cover every improvement in SP1, I'm going to cover my particular experiences. Read my review.
The average desktop PC uses about 100 watts of power while it's running. Computers still take a long time to start up, so I understand why some people leave their PCs on rather than shut them down after every use. But when you start to add up the costs, leaving your computer on actually adds up to quite a bit of money over the course of year. With the improvements in Sleep mode in Windows Vista SP1 and the excellent power management built-in to Mac OS X, you can save money, power and have a PC that starts up quickly. Continue reading to find out how.
I often run into people who can't figure out why their computers run so slowly. There are a lot of reasons a computer might be slow, but the common thread is often that these machines are three to four years old and were originally sold without much RAM. Memory was a lot more expensive a few years ago, so computer manufacturers didn't include much. Keep reading to find out if your computer needs a RAM upgrade.
I have several Firefox extensions I need to use when browsing the web, but they are incompatible with Firefox 3. I really want to try the new version of Firefox, so I did some digging and found out how to force it to install these extensions. Read on to find out how I did it.
If you're like me, you fumble around trying to pause your PC's media player every time the phone rings. The easiest way around this is to buy a multimedia-capable keyboard that has a mute or Play/Pause button. If you don't want to spend the money or you already have a keyboard you like, I have a workaround using NirCmd that allows you to mute the system volume from the keyboard.
I like to create a directory that contains all my system utilities, which I call c:\support. Then I add c:\support to my system path so I don't have to type the whole directory name every time I use a utility. This article shows you how to create the directory and add it to your system path on Windows XP and Windows Vista.
How-To
Windows Vista SP1 review 
The average desktop PC uses about 100 watts of power while it's running. Computers still take a long time to start up, so I understand why some people leave their PCs on rather than shut them down after every use. But when you start to add up the costs, leaving your computer on actually adds up to quite a bit of money over the course of year. With the improvements in Sleep mode in Windows Vista SP1 and the excellent power management built-in to Mac OS X, you can save money, power and have a PC that starts up quickly. Continue reading to find out how.
I often run into people who can't figure out why their computers run so slowly. There are a lot of reasons a computer might be slow, but the common thread is often that these machines are three to four years old and were originally sold without much RAM. Memory was a lot more expensive a few years ago, so computer manufacturers didn't include much. Keep reading to find out if your computer needs a RAM upgrade. 
I have several Firefox extensions I need to use when browsing the web, but they are incompatible with Firefox 3. I really want to try the new version of Firefox, so I did some digging and found out how to force it to install these extensions. Read on to find out how I did it.
If you're like me, you fumble around trying to pause your PC's media player every time the phone rings. The easiest way around this is to buy a multimedia-capable keyboard that has a mute or Play/Pause button. If you don't want to spend the money or you already have a keyboard you like, I have a workaround using 
I like to create a directory that contains all my system utilities, which I call c:\support. Then I add c:\support to my system path so I don't have to type the whole directory name every time I use a utility. This article shows you how to create the directory and add it to your system path on Windows XP and Windows Vista.