I’ve really enjoyed the default background images that have shipped with Vista. I think they’re beautiful, even if some don’t make great backgrounds behind a lot of desktop icons – if that’s the case, shame on you – clean that up!

If you didn’t know, Microsoft commissioned some amateur photographers to capture live-image backgrounds. I [...]

If you haven’t heard of the open-source project called Synergy, and use more than one computer side-by-side, you need to check it out. In a nutshell, it unifies individual (and often disparate) computers; connecting monitors, keyboards, mice, and “clipboards” via the network.
It claims to support practically any version of Windows (from 95 to XP, [...]

If you work at a company that’s as email-centric as mine, you’ll find yourself opening the “new mail” window in Outlook quite a bit. Although hopefully not too much – better to be responding to email than initiating new threads, though even that can get out of hand. The fewer people that generate email [...]

My friend and coworker Chris Hubbard (blog coming soon? it’s here!) showed me a cool Vista feature. I typically keep my Taskbar 2 rows tall. One for my applications, and one for my Quick Launch toolbar. Many people think I’m nuts, since even I can’t always remember what all the icons are, but [...]

I’ve been running Vista on my primary work machine since Day One (much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers). And since Day One I’ve been unable to add any network printers. I know I should be able to add them, other Vista users can add them (although I’m running Ultimate and [...]

Windows Vista’s shutdown/sleep/hibernate models have changed quite a bit from previous Windows versions. Do a quick search to get more information. Here’s a good description of some of the potential problems, and here’s a good walkthrough on how to configure the settings.
Out of the box Vista’s power management is configured with what’s called [...]

A day or so ago I ran across a very frustrating bug that I feel compelled to post here to potentially save someone else the pain I went through.
Here’s the scenario:

Install one of our legacy Win32 applications
Install IE7
Open the help–we use HTML Help (.chm files)
Everything’s working great!
Accept updates from the server (we have a custom [...]

Straight-up mapping between the Win32 API and the .NET Framework:
MSDN Win32 to .NET Framework API Map
- and -
Excellent pointers for calling unmanaged API’s, and pointing out managed equivalents, if they exist:
pinvoke.net