Archive for December, 2006
Vista tells you it needs a TPM for BitLocker, but it lies. Follow these steps to enable BitLocker without a TPM:
BitLocker is a Windows Vista security feature that encrypts an entire hard disk (technically, a volume) to protect your data if someone steals your entire computer. If you see, “The drive configuration is unsuitable for BitLocker Drive Encryption. To use BitLocker, please re-partition your hard drive according to the BitLocker requirements.â€, it means you need two partitions (a partition is a smaller section of your hard disk). As shown in the figure above, BitLocker needs a small, 1.5GB “active†partition to store the Windows Boot Manager, which basically decrypts your BitLocker-protected partition so Windows can start. The main partition, your C: drive, is the BitLocker encrypted one with your personal files, the paging file, and everything that needs to be encrypted.
Instructions after the jump.
BitLocker is a Windows Vista security feature that encrypts an entire hard disk (technically, a volume) to protect your data if someone steals your entire computer. Unfortunately, in the event of disk corruption, it can make your computer more difficult to fix and might prevent you from recovering your data–so it’s really important to do nightly backups if you enable BitLocker. Because of this, it’s not right for most people; you only need it if the privacy of your data is really important.
More after the jump
I install Vista all the time to test different things, and I never have the product key handy. During Vista setup, just leave it blank:
(more after the jump)
User Account Control (UAC) prompts you before an application makes an important change to your computer that requires administrative privileges. By default, the UAC prompt appears on the “secure desktop”, which freezes and darkens your screen. By freezing your screen, secure desktop makes it more difficult for another application to impersonate Windows and trick you into typing your administrator password into a fake UAC prompt.
The flashing screen is distracting, and slows things down a bit. To turn off the flashing without completely disabling UAC, follow these steps (after the jump):
Update: For Windows 7, read this article instead.
It seems like every program I install wants to start automatically with Windows. For example, Apple Quicktime puts an icon in the system tray. Adobe Acrobat starts automatically, just so it can more quickly open a PDF file. Each of these startup applications wastes memory and slows down how long it takes Windows Vista to start (though Windows Vista is smart about this, and lets you access the desktop before it starts all these applications).
To configure or disable startup applications in Windows Vista, follow these steps (after the jump):
Most flash games (casual games that open in your browser) assume you have a small monitor with a resolution of 800×600. If you have a higher resolution monitor, the game might be really small in the middle of your screen.
With Internet Explorer 7 (either in Windows Vista or Windows XP), you can zoom the game in to be almost full-screen (after the jump).
