The insane, nut jobs at the Russian patent office have granted a trademark to Oleg Teterin.  This man now claims ownership of the rights to the ;-) emoticon. WTF!?

Windows Vista by default has very large program/window borders. Microsoft was interested in showing off the new transparancy or "glass" interface. If you'd prefer a more slimmed-down, Window XP style border, you can easily configure this setting to make it more to your personal style.

The Quick Launch menu is one of the most useful features in Windows (2000, XP and Vista). Windows Vista makes it even easier to add a program to the menu than previous versions.

The Windows Explorer click sounds can certainly be enough to drive the average person insane after a while, especially if you work late at night like we do. Why the configuration option to turn them off would not be more obvious, we're not sure.  We can only assume there are some insane engineers at Microsoft.

I like to have the quickest access possible to folders on my desktop, which usually means putting something onto the taskbar if possible. You can add the Computer menu as a folder on the taskbar for the easiest access to your drives. You could also use this tip for any folder you want.

Using this KB Article you can recreate the native Internet Explorer icon from prior versions of Windows. This adds back functionality that Vista is missing.

The default action for the Power button on the start menu in Windows Vista is Sleep, which isn't necessarily useful for everybody. You can configure this setting easily by using the advanced power settings panel, which is a little tricky to get to normally, but we'll take the shortcut.

Ever wondered what that little button in the lower left-hand corner of the Windows Vista logon screen is? If you've clicked on it, you know that it's the Ease of Access button, useful for people with disabilities (or if your keyboard breaks).

A source of annoyance for many Windows users is the " - Shortcut" text that is added to the name of newly created shortcuts, and every time you have to manually edit the shortcut and remove that text. Wouldn't it be great if there was a registry hack for this?