Last day my Windows Vista got crashed, So I restored my laptop to factory setting. After the restoring my operating system I installed all my useful applications. Soon after the installation I opened firefox browser but then I got an error saying.

“Firefox could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome Registration. Please contact the author about this problem”

And the solution

Just run the firefox in Administrator mode.

How to run firefox in Administrator mode?

Just right click the firefox icon you can see a menu item called “Run as Administrator”. Just click the menu for a single time. You don’t need to worry that you have to do this each and every time. No there is no need once you run firefox in Administrator mode, the error will not pop up next time even if you run firefox from a normal user.

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Unlike other operating system Windows vista is notorious in its performance. There are lot of performance issues with Windows Vista, which includes memory and network performance. I had experienced lots of performance issue; most annoying problem is the network speed. I found out some interesting mechanism to improve TCP network performance. This uses the Window resize of the TCP packet to improve network speed. I already discussed lots memory improvement techniques for Vista in my blog.

The Proc

You need an administrative privilege, Make sure to run your command prompt as administrator. Right click in the command prompt, which shows a menu item called “Run as Administrator”, and of course the path of the command prompt is Start –> All Programs –> Accessories, Command. Type in your command prompt following command.

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

This will resize TCP window, their by more data on single request from the network. After restarting the system you can experience a considerable improvement in the network performance. If you are not experiencing the speed difference try to un-do the above configuration. You can use “netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal“, remember to do this command again in administrator level.

Thanks to minasi.

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Ever you felt that your mouse over and menu item opening is slow in your Windows Vista? Yeah this is true there is a delay of half a second or more. But there is a workaround to avoid this unnecessary delay. I will explain you step by step process to avoid this.

1. Open your registry editor.  Type “regedit” on your search in start menu and press enter.

2. Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.

3. Double-click the MenuShowDelay value. If it’s not there, go to Edit > New > String Value, and type MenuShowDelay for the name of the new value.

4. The numeric value you enter here is the number of milliseconds (thousandths of a second) Windows will wait before opening a menu. Enter 0 (zero) here to eliminate the delay completely.

5. Click OK and close the Registry Editor when you’re finished. Log off and then log back in or restart Windows or restart explorer.exe for this change to take effect.

This will remove menu show delay. Just do this and watch whether a significant behavior for your menu.

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In one of my previous post I described the workaround for installing Windows XP in your pre-installed Windows Vista computer and the process of partition drive in Windows Vista. But I forgot to mention about the bootloader for Vista. When we have multiple operating system installed in our system we need to choose the operating system to boot while booting your system. So we need to install a bootloader for this.

When we install an Linux or Ubuntu in our system then a bootloader will be installed with the installation process. So we can select which operating system to load during the booting process. But we are installing 2 operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows XP both are Windows. Since the primary operating system is Windows Vista we need to install a Vista booloader. Download and install VistaBootPro.

During the installation of VistaBootPro it will force to install .NET framework 2.0. Open the bootloader application. Select the radio buttons as shown in the figure below.

To add Windows XP bootloader entry, click on the Diagnostics menu item and then choose Run Diagnostics from the menu. This will scan the and find if there is an Windows XP in your system. Click on the “Manage OS Entries” tab and then click in the textbox for Rename OS Entry, and name it something useful like “Windows XP” or “Your Favorite name”.

Click the button Apply Updates and reboot the system. On your next boot process you can see the bootloader with options viz Vista and the Windows XP.

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If you are using Windows Vista you might be experiencing performance issues. Microsoft recently released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 which contain a performance improvement pack called Hotfix.

Alternate way to install Hotfix, download it from the link provided below.

Vista 32-bit users

Vista 64-bit users

After installing Hotfix it will improve performance for layered functions like accessing menus and low response times etc. The performance improvement are about 2 to 4 times. I feel better performance improvement for my laptop now.

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Snipping tool is a cool software in Microsoft Vista for bloggers who are regularly taking screen shots to show software / tool demos in the blog, moreover it will have keen interest for bug reporters. Anyway I am regularly taking screen shots to show software demos in blogs.

The snipping tool can take different types of screen shots viz full screen, rectangular, any window or free form snips. In the free form snips you need to draw the shape with your pencil, it will be grabbed to the clipboard. Just search for “snipping” in the start menu’s search you will get the application. Here is the default interface.

As I mentioned that we can take different type of screen shots. All except Free-form are familiar I guess. So I am going to explain the operations to take a screen shot using Free-form snip. In the Free-form snip we need to highlight parts of the screen shot and draw on it with a free form pen of different colors, thickness and tip styles. Here is the screen shot that taken by using Free-form Snip.

I believe this is the best tool for taking screen shots.

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Ho I need to wait for 5-6 minutes to make my laptop shutdown because I am using Microsoft Vista on my Laptop!!!. I googled about this and I found some information to avert this problem.

Edit some information in the Regedit can increase the speed of shutdown in Windows Vista.

Start Run (Windows Key +R) program and type regedit and hit enter.

Navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

On the right pane Modify the WaitToKillServiceTimeout string by right clicking on the string. The value will be 20000, make it 5000 instead. This worked well for me.

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You bought a new laptop that is embedded with Genuine Windows Vista and you are weird due the sluggish performance of Vista? By default the Vista sidebar is activated on the start up, that make the system slower. The user can add different gadgets like RSS reader, clock, CPU meter, Notes etc in the Sidebar. Ousting the sidebar saves some amount of memory so that we can increase the performance. Go through the steps described below.

Step 1)

Right click on the windows sidebar on the system tray. Check out the image below. If it is not there just go through this way Start->Programs->Accessories->Windows Sidebar

Step 2)

The Sidebar Properties window will be shown un-check the Start Sidebar when Windows starts. Click OK and Apply. Check out the figure below.

This amendment will saves considerable amount of memory thereby increase your system performance.

Check your Microsoft Vista updates regularly, also save considerable amount of memory.

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I am genuine Windows vista user, however, I am also using ubuntu, both seems very friendly for me. As far I know a lot of memory issues and bugs are available with vista that widely affects its performance. Even while the vista booting, a sluggish process, it will take more than 10 minutes, my laptop is with 1GB RAM. Anyway whatever issues available the compulsion factor to use Microsoft products are far far better as compared to others. Windows vista’s bugs created a lot of ominous with Microsoft. They have recognized the issues during their beta release itself, from that time onwards they started fixing issues with Vista. Microsoft recently released a low foot print version that reduced the memory requirements.

As a matter of fact, I would suggest all of the Vista users to check your updates regularly. If your automatic updates turned on, don’t bother about this topic. Anyway I have turned off my automatic updates, cos that save some memory of mines :-( . Let me explain how to check out updates manually.

Step 1)

On the start menu click on the All programs, and select “Windows update“.

Step 2)

On the left top of the Updates window, you can see link ‘Check for updates’, click on the link.

Step 3)

It will start searching for updates. After sometime the window will show the updates available.

Step 4)

Click on the Install updates button, it will start downloading, and will automatically install the components into your system.

Microsoft Vista service pack is now available for download.

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