For many years now, I have had my computer connected to my television and stereo so that I can watch films from my computer, sitting comfortably on my couch, or to set the mood with winamp visualisations and music when people are coming around. I have not seen many home setups which take advantage of this. It is so much nicer hearing your MP3 collection, pumping out the big speakers in your house.

It is very easy to set up and it can be done very cheaply, and in some cases free. The cost comes in with cables and adaptors which are cheap unless you need to buy an extra component. It should be possible for everyone to acheive for well under $100.

This article will show you how to connect your computer to your television and stereo. We will cover lots of different scenarios so I hope by the end of this article, everyone will have successfully been able to acheive this.

This theory is identical to if you want to hook your computer up to a projector so if that is what you use, this article is also appropriate for you.

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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.

I run multiple computers in my home and I also have one in the office. I often get frustrated that I don’t have the same favourites with me everywhere I go so I have come up with this method to synchronise my machines so that I have the same favourites with me, wherever I am and whichever machine I am on.

I have recently upgraded to Vista, so now I want to receive the same favorites on my Vista machine as I did on my XP machines. The majority of this document is the same as my article “How-to: Synchronise your IE favorites between two windows XP computers” with a change at the end for Vista. If you have already completed the mentioned article, you should be able to complete this How-to in around 2 minutes. It is much easier to make this work within Vista than it was with XP. Skip down to recipient PC.

In this article I will use offline files to ensure that the favourites are the same on both machines. This method is not simple but it is the best solution I have found. This method does require a minor registry hack and also removes network security from your favourites (not that security is all that important for favourites).

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Vista has a built in feature called User Account Control which is designed to protect us from ourselves and programs that make changes to the system which could be damaging. While this is a nice feature to have in some environments, it can become frustrating how frequently the warnings pop up.

There are a lot of good reasons to keep UAC enabled. I fear that I have seen the UAC pop up often enough to click “Continue” without taking notice of what the message says, bypassing the reasons for having it.

This article will explain a few solutions for how to deal with UAC.

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I have been using Vista for only two weeks and my Start Menu programs are cluttered and messy, requiring me to scroll through them to get to what I want. When I first played with Vista, I thought this may be a problem as you get to scroll through your programs folders, rather than hover over them and the menu open automatically. It is possible to go back to the classic start menu and use the menus as we used to, but Vistas Start Menu looks nice, so I want to tidy up my programs to make it more usable.

The most commonly used programs menu is still available and I will use this most the time, but I have more than 8 applications I use regularly so I am forced to go into the “All Programs” cesspit. I came across similar problems with previous versions of Windows, where user guides and uninstallers are all thrown into the Start Menu, when these can be accessed in the program directory itself or using by using “Add/Remove Programs” within the Control Panel.

This article will show you how to tidy up your “All Programs” menu to make it more usable. There are many different ways to file your programs away, so you will need to find out what works best for you. This article will show you how I organise my programs and hopefully give you ideas of how you can best tackle your own.

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