Four Pointless Things to do in Vista

Fed up with hints and tips telling you all the life-changing things you can do in Vista? Well here are some ‘features’ and applications which serve little or no useful purpose – but it’s nice to know you can do them.

1) Create your own Blue Screen of Death

Sure, Vista isn’t as stable as many people hoped, but nothing quite compares with the old-school white-on-blue disaster announcement. The staff of ZDNet have now figured out how to recreate those rage-inducing crashes. Bear in mind that if you do this, you will have to reboot and you will lose any unsaved work.

All you need to do is run the Registry Editor (‘regedit’ in the command box), find:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters

create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value, call it CrashOnCtrlScroll, and change the data value to 1.

Then just restart your machine, after which you can hold down the right-hand Ctrl key and hit Scroll Lock twice to say farewell to your GUI.

(Practical use: It’s a pretty severe way to test remote system recovery tools.)

2) Change the start-up screen

Bored of the ‘Microsoft Corporation’/progress bar start-up routine. If you’d prefer something that sort of, a bit, kinda looks like the Northern Lights, just run MSCONFIG from the command box, click on Boot, check ‘No GUI boot’ under Boot Options, then restart.

(Practical use: It’s appears to be a troubleshooting feature and may block some programs from starting automatically.)

3) Find out the time the complicated way

Open up Notepad, type in ‘.LOG’ (minus the quotes) and save it under any name, selecting ‘All Files’ rather than ‘.txt file’. Immediately open the file and it will now display the time and date.

(Practical use: It’s a logging feature which automatically adds the date and time every time you save the file, which could be handy if you haven’t figured out how to use a real diary.)

4) Take screenshots of part of the screen

Vista includes ‘Snipping Tool’ (just type that into the Windows Menu search bar), which allows you to take a free-form ‘snip’. Rather than taking a shot of the entire screen, you can draw around the exact section you want to ‘snap’, regardless of the shape.

(Practical use: It’s inherently useful… assuming you haven’t figured out how to use the crop or lasso features in your image editor of choice.)