5 Windows Vista Tips for Laptop Users

Operating systems mean different things to different people and that view often has something to do with the type of machine which the individual is using. Laptops perform very differently to desktop PCs, as do Apple Macs from, say, Acers. What we have found out is that there are five great ways to use the Windows Vista operating system on your laptop to maximise its performance and get the most out of your very up-to-date technology.

1. Windows Vista is Microsoft’s most recent operating system and was released on January 30th 2007. Since then it has been downloaded from the Vista website, changed, upgraded, recommended, criticised and customised. One of the most exciting features on the words of software developer’s mouths at the time of its release was the ‘Windows Aero’ interface which not only looks great but makes browsing the computer a lot more open. Our very first tip for laptop users is that if you haven’t got too used to using this feature then turn it off and you’ll see a great improvement from your battery. Of course, you need to weigh up the pros and cons of turning it off as battery life isn’t an issue for people who only use their laptops at home.

2. Secondly, we understand that with a notebook you’re quite likely to be sitting somewhere in public for a short period of time. This means you haven’t got time to be rooting around through extensive menus and just want to be able to click once and do what you want immediately. When you’re in a browser and want to carry out a quick process just press the ALT key and watch as the file, edit, view navigation tabs appear on the bar. Neat, huh?

3. Dragging and dropping files with a touchpad mouse can be a pain in the neck (or hands, more appropriately). That’s why Vista’s multi-tagging file viewing tool is particularly good on a laptop because it allows you to click checkboxes next to each file and apply a command to each one. Simply open a window and under ‘tools’, ‘folder options’, ‘view’ just check ‘use check boxes to select items’.

4. As you already know, laptops have a keyboard in very close proximity to the mouse, so holding down shift as you right click on an item is going to be considerably easier for the laptop user than the desktop user. What does this do? It expands the right click menu. The original idea was to clean up the right click menu and initially just display the most popular commands with shift clicking bringing up more meticulous options.

5. Last but not least, our fifth recommendation for laptop users with Windows Vista is to take full advantage of the laptop mobility center built into the operating system. Before with and OS like XP the only thing that laptop users had differently from desktop users was the battery icon in the system tray. Now when Vista users type ‘mobility’ into the Start search bar they’re presented with a pretty little box, filled with everything a laptop user could ever need to customise their operating system.