Network Icon Disappeared!

My Network Icon and Volume Icon disappeared from the Windows Vista taskbar for some reason. If it happens to you, right click on the taskbar and select Properties (at the bottom). On the Notification Area panel, you'll see the System Icons section, if the icons you want are unchecked, check them.



The problem is when they are grayed out. In this case, the first thing you can try is restarting explorer.exe. Go into Windows Vista task manager, and end the process. Then restart it by clicking Create New Task and typing in explorer.exe

If that doesn't do it, then you need to go into the registry editor under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify key.

And delete from there, IconStreams and PastIconStream.

Now restart explorer.exe again just as before. The icons probably won't show up still. Now all you need to do is right click on taskbar and go to Notification Area panel and enable the missing icons by selecting their checkboxes.

Credit where it's due.

Labels: vista, windows vista

Vista's too slow?

You can speed up your Microsoft Vista computer by turning off all the pretty stuff. It'll look like Windows 2000, but it it'll be faster than Vista.

Simply do the following:

Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings

Then click Settings in the Performance section.

That'll bring up the Visual Effects tab.

From the four radio buttons, choose Adjust for best performance. If you change your mind you can always go back and choose one of the other options, including the default option.

You would think that a computer with 2GB of RAM should be able to run everything smoothly, but Vista uses a huge amount of system memory, so from time to time you may want to turn off the visual effects features to speed things up.

Labels: microsoft, performance, ram, vista

How to set the MS-DOS path in Microsoft Vista

I upgraded to Vista and had to re-install all my web development software, including Vim. I use a lot of Vim plugins, one of them being Taglist. So I started Vim on the new machine, but the Taglist plugin wouldn't load, because the ctags path could not be found!

Largely for my own reference, here's how to set the path variable in Windows (Vista), follow these steps:

Control Panel > System and Maintenance > System >
Advanced System Settings > Advanced (tab) >
Environment Variables (button) >

Scroll down until you see path and click the edit button.

Labels: dos, path, vista, windows