Vista's Blue Screen of Death

One of the more common issues with connecting your Vista based PC to the internet is a lack of connectivity accompanied by the cryptic "Unknown Network, Local Access Only" message popping up in the message area/system tray. This is part of a 'feature' in Vista to improve security while browsing from public wifi connections, such as coffee shops. It has, like so many other new features, caused a few headaches when trying to connect home internet connections. But there's an easy fix.
Open your control panel from the start menu and find the Network and Sharing Center.

Finally, a way to insert your own themes into Vista. Replacing the theme dll in XP has long been a way to get around the complete lack of alternate themes in Windows XP but, until recently, Vista hasn't had one available. There's a few styles up on DeviantArt right now, but I fully expect more to pop up very soon. Especialy if the library of available XP themes is anything to judge by.

  Download Here List of Notable Changes This service pack contains compatibility fixes for many of the drivers Vista users have been having difficulty with, according to Microsoft.

or: Digging Around in the Windows Sewer System

I've had it. I give up. Reinstalled XP the other day and couldn't be happier. I did, however give me an excellent chance to compare the two operating systems. Compared to Vista, XP just snaps those windows into place when I run a program. For general speed, there's no beating it. Oddly enough, there was one thing at which Vista has a serious advantage and that's Winamp (and media player). In Vista, Winamp 5 seemed much more responsive, where in XP it can ignore your clicks for a second or two on occaision for whatever odd reason.

Straight out of the box, file sharing between a Linux PC and a Windows PC generally won’t work. The primary cause is Vista’s lack of NTLM authentication by default. It ships with the newer, more secure NTLMv2 enabled. Samba in Linux, on the other hand, is exactly reversed. It ships with support for the older protocols enabled and v2 disabled.

If you start experiencing STOP errors after a recent Windows Update and are running AVG Anti-Rootkit or spyware, KB938371 may be the cause of your troubles. This update, a patch for the Windows Trusted Installer, has reportedly caused error 0x0000007E in avgarkt.sys and 0x000000D1 after uninstallation of Anti-Rootkit if Anti-Spyware is left in place. It can apparently cause a cascading failure through these particular products and possibly AVG's Antivirus as well. It also happens to be a prerequisite to installing Service Pack 1 RC1 for Vista.

The ActiveX components Visual Studio gives easy access to contain a wealth of time saving reusable components. Unfortunately for some users, the adoption of Windows Vista brought to light a bug in the way Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) interact with UAC. In some configurations the COM Components tab, which lets you add these controls to your toolbox, will have either very few entries or non at all. This can lead to a great deal of frustration and wasted time.

If you own a Dell and are having STOP error problems, Dell has a support section just for you.

In certain systems that dual boot Windows Vista and Windows XP, severe data corruption can occur if the Vista installation resides on a SATA device which is accessed from an XP install located on an IDE hard disk. The first hint is often chkdsk popping up when booting Vista and showing a very large number of errors. If left unchecked, this will eventually render the Vista drive non-bootable and produce an error complaining about winload.exe being corrupt.