Our team has talked a lot in our previous articles about Disk Defragmenter and the changes introduced in Windows Vista and Service Pack 1. In this article, I would like to measure how the system performance is affected by the defragmentation process. Basically, I want to find out what is the performance hit on your system while this tool is running and defragmenting your data. To see the results and conclusions of my analysis click on read more.

So far we have published many articles about managing your sounds and working with sound devices in Windows Vista. However, we have not yet shown you how to disable or change specific sounds from your default Windows Vista sound scheme. This is what this article will cover and, as you will see for yourself, the procedure is pretty easy to follow.

Our friends from The WinVista Club have recently released a nice little tool called Ultimate Windows Tweaker. As you can imagine, the tool allows you to tweak lots of aspects in Windows Vista. For a complete list of available tweaks (over 130 in total), check out the tweaks page.

When choosing which tool to review next on our site, we stopped for Driver Scanner 2009, as it promises to address one major problem that people have with their computers: keeping your drivers up to date at any time with minimum effort. Keeping track of driver updates for all components that are included in your system is a time consuming task for everybody, mostly for beginners. Not too many people really know the custom details of their hardware devices, and thus installing the correct drivers for every component is a difficult task. Using a single software for finding, downloading and installing the necessary drivers and updates seems to be an excellent idea. Now let's see how this idea got implemented and whether Driver Scanner 2009 really delivers what computer users need.

System Restore is a very useful feature included in Windows Vista which allows you to restore your system and files to a previous state. We have covered this tool on many occasions. However, we did not show you how to enable or disable this tool for one partition or more. In this article we will cover these two topics.

This summer we asked our visitors about the Windows Vista features that should be improved on Windows 7. One of the very discussed features was the User Account Control (UAC). Many people find it rather annoying, therefore they would like to see it improved. Even though Windows Vista Service Pack 1 diminished the number of UAC prompts that one can encounter, it can still get annoying to some users. Despite being easy to disable it, it is not a wise choice, as it exposes you to much more security threats. To keep the annoyance level at a minimum, there are several alternatives to UAC. I'm going to present you one of them, called Norton User Account Control. I've tested it for three weeks now on two different computers and I find it a great alternative to the standard UAC.

In one of our previous articles I presented to you the Task Manager tool. I talked about its features and how to use it to handle your computer better. In this article I will show you how to give or block user access to this powerful tool. All you have to do is to download a small archive and run the appropriate file, depending on your needs. It is as easy as that.

Many of our visitors sent us messages with questions about what applications, plugins and tools they should install on their PC so that common computing tasks such as viewing movies, listening to music, browsing the Internet can work from the first try. In order to answer such questions, we invited a few of our friends from other famous blogs and tried to come up with a great list of recommendations. In this article you will have your questions answered by: the famous How-To Geek, Anand Khanse from the WinVistaClub, Joseph Fieber from ITsVISTA.com and Ross McKillop from Simple Help.