brijmin on Tech

The Vista Forums walks through the process of adding multiple quick launch toolbars to your double-height taskbar-making an organized application launcher with no extra software.

One of the highlights of Windows Vista’s new UI is the task switcher thumbnail feature, which provides a large thumbnail preview of applications minimized on the Vista Taskbar. Simply hover your mouse pointer over the taskbar button for any program to open the image.

There are plenty of hardware-free solutions for squeezing a little bit more gaming performance out of your Windows system. Heck, there are even a number of tools built right in to Windows that you can use to cut down on background performance drains before you fire up your favorite game – like services.msc, for example.

FastAero is a Windows XP utility that adds a transparency effect to some program windows. The effect is similar to one of the components of the Aero Glass interface on Windows Vista: You can see through borders of some programs and more easily see what’s going on behind the program window.

If you’ve been counting on Windows 7 as your salvation from Vista, think again. According to PC World tests, Windows 7 appears to be essentially a repackaging of Vista, running the same basic processes and sporting similar performance and memory usage. On the plus side, Windows 7 does deliver several new features, and it isn’t shipping [...]

UBCD4Win is a bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem. Our goal is to be the most complete and easy to use free computer diagnostic tool. Almost all software included in UBCD4Win are freeware utilities for Windows.

PC Audit checks the various values and variables on your computer more easily using desktop diagnosis tool PC Audit. Available as a portable-friendly standalone executable, PC Audit checks system values covering everything from your BIOS version to Windows Product Key to startup entries.