I have a seen a number of websites reporting that the “Run” command is missing out of Vistas Start Menu. There is good reason for this as we can now launch our programs straight out of the search box. Type in whichever command you want to run in the search box and it will function just as the “Run” command did.

Armed with the above information, for whatever reason you still want the “Run” command in your start menu, please do the following.

Right click on the “Start Menu”

Select “Properties”

Select “Customize”

Tick the “Run command”

Click OK

You will now have the “Run” command in your start menu as it was back in the days of XP.

I am adjusting to running my programs out of the search box. I am finding that although it is not natural for me to launch applications this way, it has never failed me. I am just taking some time to adjust. 

The “Customize Start Menu” gives you a lot of options that you can change in the “Start Menu” to make it as you like it. You can add or remove just about any aspect of the start menu from here.

Many companies limit us from making changes to our work computer. The last company I worked for would not allow us to install software or make changes to the interface. The screen saver was set to cycle through the photos in “My pictures” which resulted in many complaints from staff as they did not feel they had any freedom. Other staff got in trouble because of the pictures that were showing up but that’s another story.

If you do have the freedom to change your screen saver, take advantage of this freedom and give your computer a personalised touch.

Vista provides us with a few new screen savers which are much more artistic than what XP offered us. To change your screen saver, do the following:

1. Right click on your desktop and open “Personalization”
2. Select “Screen Savers”
3. Try some of them out by selecting and previewing them.

You are also able to find sites to download other screen savers from, but with the nice selection that Vista offers, this 20 second touch up won’t need to turn into an epic adventure.

It is good practice to have a password set on your Windows account to protect your valuable documents from people who should not be able to see them. This is especially important in the workplace. I would not try to change my workplace computer.

When we move into a home scenario, we don’t usually mind if other family members can see our files. It is still important to have a password set up to protect ourselves from network traffic, but we don’t need to put it in each time we turn on our computer.

In Windows XP, we could select “Run” and type in “control userpasswords2” and change some settings so that we could log in automatically to a selected account. Vista allows for the same command. 

Click on the Start orb and type “control userpasswords2” in the search box and press enter.

All we need to do now is, untick “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”.

Click “Apply” and enter in the username and password of the user you want to log in as.

When you reboot, you will no longer be required to enter in your password.

While this does remove a lot of security to our computer, it also allows us to bypass a frustrating step in the machine boot up.

Just keep in mind, if your machine is stolen, your data is open to anyone who gets their hands on the computer.

I came across this by accident and switched back to a normal desktop background quick smart. We used to be concerned about too many icons on the desktop taking up valuable system resources. Vista however lets us take this one step further with a useless but crafty feature.

We are now able to play Windows Media videos as the background of our desktop as well as Windows Dreamscene content. This is a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra.

Windows Dreamscene content is things like waterfalls and other nice things which I don’t really have an interest in. There may be a few more interesting looped movies in the future. Developers could do some great stuff with this.

To get it all to happen, you have a couple of options. you can select a WMV file and right click on it, select “Set as Desktop Background”

You can also go into your wallpaper settings and select the either the Video or Windows Dreamscene Content boxes.

I can’t see much use for setting this up as you would generally have programs open over the top of it. You can’t play DivX films or the like under it. Saying that, I like to use a proper media player to do this.

It’s fun to have a play with but for me, this will be forgotten about quickly.

There are many reasons why you may want to send an email at a particular time. You may want to catch the recipient at the time you know they check their emails so your email is at the top of their list, or you might be out of the office at the time you want to send a message. Many email packages allow you to set the time the email will be sent to the recipients but today we look at Outlook 2003.

When you start a new message, click on options and look at the delivery options section. All you need to do is set the time and date. Fill out the rest of the email and press send, your computer will look after the rest. Depending on what system you are on, it is best to leave your computer on so that the computer can send the message as it is meant to.