I spend a lot of my time on the phone with people in New York and London, but am based in San Francisco. What I’d love to have on my Vista machine is a set of clocks on the screen that can show me the time in these other regions, but I can’t add unapproved software to the machine here at work. Solution?

Dave’s Answer:

There is a very elegant solution, actually, and it’s one of the neat little hidden features of Microsoft Windows Vista that – dare I say it? – I really like!

Well, you can’t have multiple “analog” clocks with this little trick, but you can most definitely have multiple digital displays, and even better, they’re neatly hidden until you need to check on the times and make sure you’re not calling too early or late.

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As folks know, I bought Vista to run on VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. I’d felt it was slow and bloated but I figured I’d give it a good run to really make up my mind. What I like about Vista:

• The UI is nicer than XP. XP always felt like a cartoon and earlier versions of Windows were just… dull.
• The security level actually made me feel more comfortable about the integrity of the O/S. That said, it never alerted me to any suspicious activity or hacking attacks…
• In general, I found the organization of the O/S more intuitive – after the initial learning curve. It felt a bit more “Mac-like” in some indefinable way.
• It is stable. Much more stable than any previous version of Windows I’ve used (and I’ve used every version since 3.1). Apart from reboots for security updates (more on that below), I had Vista up and running for days, even weeks sometimes, just putting the Mac to sleep, switching networks without problems and so on. Rock solid.

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Microsoft Vista has suffered one embarrassing blow after another: people were shunning it, people were returning to XP, and so on.

It seems that Vista is gradually gaining ground, however, and according to a new study, people are somewhat pleased with the results.

CDW‘s Windows Vista Tracking Poll found that about 58 percent of “IT decision makers” who were using Vista had either a somewhat or very favorable opinion of it. Another 20 percent of respondents weighed in somewhere within the neutral range of feelings.

Not bad, eh?

These numbers, and the positions of the people surveyed, certainly imply that a lot of upgrades will be taking place, and CDW’s stats seem to back the idea.

The company states, “The final phase of the year-long study finds Windows Vista gaining traction in the mainstream business market, with 48 percent of respondents stating that their organization is using or evaluating Windows Vista – up from 29 percent in the previous poll taken in February 2007 and from 12 percent in the first poll taken in October 2006.”

Vista still doesn’t have a huge fan base, though; there’s no getting around that.

The fact that anyone is impressed by a “using or evaluating” rate of less than 50 percent, and that 22 percent of IT decision makers who are using Vista retain either a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of it, is not good for Microsoft.

Even less so since Vista is not a new product, and is instead almost a year old.

Also, there’s the recent recommendation of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency that UK schools not switch to Vista.

Given this split, service packs look likely to remain a turning point in the debate, and fans of XP, Macs, and Linux will continue to have powerful voices.

For the last few days, my wife’s PC (that I’m almost done building) wouldn’t go to sleep when I hit the appropriate button on the keyboard. Instead, the screen would fade to black, but the loud fans would keep going and the whole thing would come right back awake the instant I moved the mouse. It took about ten minutes to figure out why this was happening, so if you need a solution, here it is.

If you’ve recently turned on media sharing on your PC (like you recently connected it to an Xbox 360 or other remote media device, or even just messed with the media settings), Windows probably activated “Away Mode” and didn’t bother telling you that. Thanks a lot. (more…)

I’ve heard that Windows Vista Ultimate has two different firewalls included; I want to be able to scan both incoming and outgoing data. How do I do that? Does it matter which firewall I use?

It’s true; Windows Vista Ultimate does contain two separate, but very different, types of firewalls: (more…)

I’ve made the move to Microsoft Windows Vista and am digging the new interface, but I am a bit frustrated that anyone else who uses my computer can see the latest applications and files I’ve worked with right on the Start menu. Is there some easy solution?

The solution is quite easy and is two clicks away in Microsoft Vista, actually. In fact, it’s exactly the same as the solution to this question for Microsoft Windows XP too, now that I think about it. Here’s what you do… (more…)