Disable the restart now prompt

I’m sure you recognize the reminder we all love to hate.  I could easily disable automatic updates altogether so I don’t get the prompt at all, but knowing me, I’d forget to check for months at a time.  I went searching for a better solution mainly because I was playing a game online one day when the prompt came up in the middle of the game, which forced the game to minimize.  There’s nothing like being in the middle of an attack by a horde of zombies (Left 4 dead, ftw!) when the game suddenly minimizes to remind me to restart my computer!  Ahhh!

Permanently stop Windows Update from both restarting your computer automatically and reminding you to restart:

1. Go to start -> run (for Vista type this in the search bar), type gpedit.msc.
2. Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components – > Windows Update.
3. Double-click No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations and enable it.
4. Then to stop that irritating reminder from popping up every 10 minutes, double-click on Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.  You would think that disabling this would disable the reminder, but it does the same leaving it not configured would do – allows the reminder to popup to interrupt you every 10 minutes.  I don’t quite understand that.  But anyway, after opening the box for this, click on enable and type a 1440 in the box.  This will set it to remind you once a day so you can restart it whenever you want.

I don’t have a Vista box here to test it on, but I’m fairly certain the directions are the same.  If not, leave a comment and I’ll update them.

Free utilities for tweaking Windows Part 1

I decided to come up with a list a programs I use to maintain my Vista laptop.  I got some from this PC World article and others I found on download.com.  Instead of making one massive post I’ll break it up into two or three.

First on my list and the most exciting to me is a cool thing called VirtuaWin.

I use Linux all the time at work, the only time I use Windows is when I have to do some maintenance for those in the office who use it. I fell completely in love with the multiple workspaces that you can use in Linux. I have a separate space for email, another for my browser, and another for whatever else I happen to be playing with or troubleshooting. Having multiple workspaces is absolutely necessary for my job, I do way too many things at once to not need that feature.

I got so excited when I heard from a friend of mine about a nifty little program that allows you to have multiple workspaces in Windows. I then read an article somewhere, that I can’t seem to find the link for, about it so I thought I’d give it a try. I was a little worried about how much memory it would suck up and whether it would slow down the start-up and shutdown process of my laptop. I noticed a bit of a slowdown but the benefits outweigh it since it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.

You can have up to 9 workspaces, which I find to be way too many. I have 4 set up but probably only use 3 of them on a regular basis. By default, the hotkey to move between desktops is the windows key + arrow key. There’s an option to make it so that when you’re mouse is against the edge of your screen it switches to another workspace, but I found that to be incredibly irritating so I stuck to the hotkey.  Another thing I like about it is that I finally have a use for the ability of the wheel on my mouse to click.  If I click on the title bar of a window with the mouse wheel it gives the option to move that application to one of the other workspaces – I use that all the time.  You can also add modules from their website to add features, although there aren’t very many.  That’s another plus, they didn’t add a bunch of useless features to the basic installation, if you want extras you can install them yourself.  This is compatible with Vista all the way back to Win98, so if you have a Windows machine this will work for you.

I need a nap, more to come.