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You start typing only to realize 10 seconds later that the focus is on the wrong window. You see a Windows notification pop out of the taskbar only to have it fade away before you can figure out what it means. You get distracted by all of Windows' pointless animations. You miss seeing keyboard-shortcut hints on menu entries and elsewhere in Windows dialog boxes.

You could spend hours hunting for the settings that will do away with these four Windows annoyances. At least Vista collects them all in the Ease of Access Center. These usability settings are spread far and wide in XP.

Mouse over a window to make it the focus
About once or twice a week I find myself happily typing away only to discover after crafting the perfect memo opener or e-mail retort that the focus had switched to another open window. Not only have I lost the data I thought I was entering, I might inadvertently purchase a Winnebago if I press Enter while focused on the wrong page in my browser.

You can set Vista to change the focus to whichever window you mouse over via the Ease of Access Center. Press the Windows key and U to open it.

I described the top four options (all carryovers from XP's Accessibility Control Panel applet) in a previous post. To change focus by hovering, click "Make the mouse easier to use" and check "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse" near the bottom of the dialog box. Click Save or Apply to activate the change.

The simplest way I know of to change this setting in XP is to use the free Tweak UI utility. After you download and install the program, open it and double-click Mouse in the left pane. Choose X-Mouse among the entries that appear, and check "Activation follows X-Mouse" in the right window.

Bonus tip: To keep programs from stealing the focus, choose Focus under General in the left pane, click "Prevent applications from stealing focus" in the right pane, and choose the number of times you want the window to flash when this happens.

Set Vista notification pop-ups to stay on screen longer
Sometimes the little windows that pop out of the taskbar to notify you of some event, such as a USB device you just plugged in being ready to use, disappear too quickly. To extend the duration of notification windows in Vista, click "Make it easier to focus on tasks" in the Ease of Access Center, scroll to the bottom of the resulting dialog box, and change the setting under "How long should Windows notification boxes stay open?" The default setting is 7 seconds, and the available options let you change this to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 5 minutes. When you're done, click Save or Apply.

Extend the time Vista's notification windows stay visible via this setting in the Ease of Access Center.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The only way I know of to change the duration of notification windows in XP is to tweak the Registry. This is also how you disable notifications altogether. I'll describe the procedure in a future post.

Knock off the frivolous animations
Save some CPU cycles--and maybe your tired eyeballs--by telling Windows to do without the fancy-schmancy animations. In Vista, click "Make it easier to focus on tasks" in the Ease of Access Center (the same dialog I described above for tweaking notifications), check "Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)" under "Adjust time limits and flashing visuals," and click Save or Apply.

To tone down the animations in XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties > Advanced, and click Settings in the Performance section. Under the Visual Effects tab, click "Adjust for best performance," or choose Custom and select the options you do and don't want in the window below. When you're done, click OK twice.

Show shortcut keys on menu items
Microsoft doesn't always make it easy for people who prefer to navigate around Windows and their applications using keyboard shortcuts. To make the key hints visible on menus in Vista, click "Make the keyboard easier to use" in the Ease of Access Center, check "Underline keyboard shortcuts and access keys" under "Make it easier to use keyboard shortcuts," and click Save or Apply.

See hints for shortcut keys on Vista menus by choosing this option in the Ease of Access Center.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Add the shortcut-key hints to XP by right-clicking the desktop (or pressing Shift-F10 while on the desktop), choosing Properties, clicking Appearance > Effects, unchecking "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key," and clicking OK twice.

About a year ago I tested a Sony GPS device. The device is long gone, but a shortcut to the product's personal My Documents folder remained among the Send To options on my context (right-click) menu.

Getting rid of this useless entry was as easy as opening Windows' Send To folder and removing its shortcut. Press the Windows key and R, type Shell:sendto, and press Enter to open the Send To folder. In the right pane, right-click the shortcut associated with the item you want to remove and choose Delete > Yes.

Remove an unwanted entry from the Send To menu by deleting its shortcut.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Adding an entry to your Send To menu is just as easy. Right-click in the right pane and select New > Shortcut. Enter the path to the folder you want to create a Send To shortcut for, or click Browse, navigate to it, and click Next. Enter a name for the shortcut, and click Finish.

Enter the path to the folder you want to access from the Send To menu.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Note that just dragging a shortcut from the Start menu or elsewhere into this window and dropping it there may not work. You have to enter the exact path, particularly if you want to add a shortcut to Notepad or another application.

Tomorrow: an antivirus-software buyer's guide.

What I really want to do is add a link to Google Docs on the right-click (context) menu in Windows Explorer. That way, I could open a file in Google Docs by right-clicking it in Explorer and choosing Send To > Google Docs.

Well, I wasn't able to figure out how to do this. So instead, I created a shortcut to open Google Docs, and then I browsed to the file and opened it the old-fashioned way.

This won't save you a lot of time, but at least Google Docs makes it easy for you to transmit the file to the service as an e-mail attachment. And, of course, you can send the file to other e-mail recipients at the same time.

To create the shortcut to Google Docs, log in to the service, copy the URL in the address bar, right-click the desktop or any folder window, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL in the Location field, click Next, type Google Docs (or the name of your choice), and press Enter (or click Finish).

Now navigate to the shortcut you just created, right-click it, and choose Properties. Click in the "Shortcut key" box, and type your preferred keyboard shortcut (I chose Ctrl-Alt-G).

Give your Google Docs shortcut a keyboard sequence to open the service in a flash.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Now you can open the service by pressing the keyboard shortcut you just entered. Once it opens, choose Upload in the top-left corner of the window, browse to and select the file, give it a name (or use the existing file name), and click Upload File.

Alternatively, you can copy the unique e-mail address Google Docs generated for you under E-mail Your Documents and Files, open your e-mail program, paste the address in the To: field, and add any other recipients you want to send the file to. The file will be attached to the message automatically.

Google Docs limits your HTML and text files (including Word's .doc and .rtf) to 500KB, presentations to 10MB from your computer, and 2MB from a Web site (500KB as e-mail attachments), and spreadsheets to 1MB (spreadsheets can't be uploaded as e-mail attachments).

I'll keep looking for a way to add Google Docs to my right-click menu (either via the Open With or Send To submenus, or directly on the context menu), and when I find it, I'll let you know.

Tomorrow: remove unwanted items from your Send To menu.

For whatever reason, the last time I booted my Vista laptop the network icon was missing from its usual spot next to the clock in the system tray.

I right-clicked the Start button, chose Properties, and clicked the Notification Area tab to recheck this option under "System icons," but it was grayed out.

I found the solution on Colin Cochrane's blog. Here are the steps in a nutshell:

Back up the Registry by creating a restore point.
Press the Windows key, type regedit, and press Enter to open the Registry Editor.
Navigate to and select HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify.
Delete both IconStreams and PastIconStream in the right pane.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and select Start Task Manager.
Select the Processes tab, choose explorer.exe, and click End Process.
Choose the Applications tab, click New Task, enter explorer.exe in the text box, and press Enter.

Your icons should reappear.

Return missing icons to Vista's system tray by editing the Registry, stopping explorer.exe, and restarting the process via Task Manager.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Another option for taskbar problems is the free Taskbar Repair Tool Plus, which I found on Kelly Theriot's Kelly's Korner.

Tomorrow: the best OpenOffice.org templates and clipart.

As has been widely reported (for example, by EDN Magazine and both Brooke Crothers and Dan Ackerman here at CNET), Intel has delayed the first customer shipments (FCS) of its "Montevina" chipsets, part of the new Centrino 2 platform.

The delays are pretty short, however... a matter of just a few weeks.

Intel attributes the delays to two independent problems: one with FCC certification of the 802.11n WiFi feature in the chips (just "paperwork," Intel says), and one with the integrated graphics engines in some models.

Intel's probably right about the WiFi certification problem. I've been through the FCC certification process (for electromagnetic interference (EMI), at least); there sure is a lot of paperwork involved.

For the graphics problem, I see a couple of possible explanations.

Intel could have discovered a design flaw in the first production units severe enough to prevent them from being shipped, which would have caused a substantial delay while a new run of production units was completed. (See my earlier blog post, "Design flaws, defects, and faults", for an explanation of how design flaws are related to product defects and faults.) This delay would have been largely hidden by the usual rounds of testing, but perhaps it just used up a little more time than the slack that was available in the schedule.

Or perhaps there was a design or manufacturing flaw that didn't require trashing the first production run, but which did require some additional testing and qualification to reject specific problematic parts. This could be caused by slower or hotter operation than expected, for example. Such a problem would cause a shorter delay-- just the extra testing time. A statement from Intel in the Crothers post referring to "re-screening" suggests this is the situation here, although potentially that statement could also describe testing a second production run to ensure the problem has been solved.

I find it interesting that this problem is related to Intel's new graphics engine, which is certainly the most important element of the new chipset. Intel's previous integrated graphics products have been criticized for not really being up to the challenges of running Windows Vista, including by Microsoft itself, but due to pressure from Intel, Microsoft certified these chips as "Vista Capable." That's technically true-- I've used integrated-graphics platforms under Vista myself-- but the resulting shortfalls in performance and features probably discouraged many new Vista users.

Graphics engines are very complicated, and getting more complicated every year. Intel started out well enough in the graphics business when it worked with Real3D (now defunct) to develop the Intel740, a discrete graphics chip, but 18 months later it found itself already 18 months behind ATI and NVIDIA, and fell back to selling only integrated-graphics chipsets, where the graphics component is worth only a few dollars in incremental revenue.

Intel plans to get back into the market for discrete graphics chips in 2009 or (more likely) 2010 with "Larrabee", a multi-core CPU in which some cores are optimized for graphics processing. I think Larrabee will turn out to be a technical disaster, but Intel has leveraged its market domination to turn previous technical disasters into financial windfalls. Think of the Pentium 4's "Hyper-Pipelined" design, for example, which was too hot and too inefficient, ultimately forcing Intel to bring its predecessor, the P6 design, back from the grave several years later. Intel's current graphics engines, however, are barely worth selling today, and they won't be worth reviving after Larrabee has run its course.

Windows XP's Documents list (a.k.a. "My Recent Documents") and Vista's Recent Items are useful Start menu shortcuts that I'm always forgetting about.

Yesterday I described how to change the number of recently opened files that appear in Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007. But it's even quicker to reopen a file you've worked on recently and its application with a single click of the file's shortcut on the Start menu.

If you don't see My Recent Documents on XP's Start menu, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. Click Customize > Advanced, select "List my most recently opened documents" under "Recent documents," and click OK twice. To show Recent Items on the Start menu in Vista, right-click the Start button, choose Properties, click the Start Menu tab, select "Store and display a list of recently opened files," and click OK.

Show Windows Vista's Recent Items on the Start menu by checking this option in Taskbar and Start Menu Properties.

(Credit: Microsoft)

To clear the list in XP, return to the Start Menu Advanced Properties dialog box, choose Clear List, and click OK twice. Do the same in Vista by right-clicking Recent Items on the Start menu and choosing Clear Recent Items List.

If you would prefer not to have Windows keep a record of your recently opened files, or you'd like to change the number of entries on this menu, you can do so by editing the Registry. Before you begin, back up the Registry by using System Restore to create a restore point.

With your Registry backup in place, press the Windows key (Vista) or click Start > Run (XP), type regedit, and press Enter. In XP, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer. In Vista, the key you want to select is HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer.

In both versions, double-click NoRecentDocsHistory. If no such key exists, right-click in the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and name the key NoRecentDocsHistory.

In the Value Data field, enter 1. When you restart Windows, your recent documents list will be history.

To change the number of files listed on this menu, double-click MaxRecentDocs in the same pane--or if there's no such key, right-click, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, name the new key MaxRecentDocs, and double-click it. Enter the number of documents you want to show in the Value Data field, and click OK.

Tomorrow: customizing the history settings in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Update at 7:10 a.m. Wed., May 14: A correction was made to this story. See details below.

Some users of Windows Vista Media Center say they were blocked from recording the NBC Universal TV shows American Gladiator and Medium on Monday night.

"Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator prohibit recording of this program," the error message read.

At Thegreenbutton.com a message board popular with DVR enthusiasts, those affected tried to figure out what was causing the block. When this kind of thing happens, people immediately question whether TV and cable networks are trying to thwart time-shifting technologies and force people to watch commercials again. Even though it's rarely done, content providers do have the ability to communicate with some time-shifting hardware to block the recording of shows or broadcasts.

"This is indicative of why the current DRM schemes are flawed," said Marcel Good, an IT director in Northern California and one of the people prevented from recording the NBC shows. "It affects people who intend to legally consume content. They have no intention of stealing the content. The people who want to steal already have ways around DRM."

On Tuesday, the cause for the block of the NBC Universal shows was still unclear. Representatives from both the network and Microsoft said they would need time to look into the matter.

Until they do, here are the few available clues. Most of those who posted at Thegreenbutton were Vista users recording digital cable with ATI cablecard tuners.

A TiVo spokeswoman said the DVR company received no customer complaints about being blocked from recording.

This isn't the first time a Vista Media Center user has complained about being barred from recording. A person identified as Alex from Canada wrote 14 months ago at Thegreenbutton: "Often a small number of my shows fail to record, and in the Windows event log I see errors about 'copy protection set by the broadcaster.'"

The shows Alex tried to record came from the Toronto-based W Network. Alex was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit and when attempting to record the show Friends: Trial by Jury received this message in Media Center's event logs: "Friends was not recorded. Recording of this content is prohibited by the content provider."

Jessica Zahn, a program manager in Microsoft's Media Center TV group, who according to Thegreenbutton has volunteered to answer questions at the site, apparently responded to Alex (a Microsoft spokeswoman said she could not confirm the message came from Zahn). The person who responded under the username JessZahn said the problem had either one of two causes.

"The broadcaster is setting the 'Copy Never' flag and Media Center's behavior is expected or Media Center is misinterpreting data it receives," and someone at Microsoft would need to study the stream of the show to know for sure.

What remains unclear, however, is whether those who posted complaints at Thegreenbutton shared the same cable provider.

I'll update this story as soon as I get more information.

Correction: This story erred in stating when Alex in Canada posted to Thegreenbutton.com. The post was from March 2007.

Well, Microsoft has finally come clean about the real motivation behind Vista's User Account Control feature. As Tom Espiner's reports from the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft UAC Program Manager David Cross admits that UAC was designed to annoy users.

Espiner quotes Cross telling the security-conference audience that negative user reaction was the only way to coax independent software vendors to update their applications for Vista. As fewer programs violated Vista's rules, users would have to click through fewer UAC prompts.

I'd feel worse about being manipulated by the biggest corporation in the world if UAC weren't such a good idea, though less-than-perfectly implemented. It's true that disabling the feature may allow a balky application or process to work, but too many important Vista features rely on UAC.

To change your UAC setting, press the Windows key, type user accounts, and press Enter. Click "Turn User Account Control on or off," and check or uncheck Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer."

Alter Vista's User Account Control setting via the User Accounts Control Panel applet.

(Credit: Microsoft)

You get more granular control over UAC's behavior via the Local Security Settings. To access these options, you must be logged in as an administrator, and the PC must not be on a domain. Press the Windows key, type secpol.msc, and press Enter. (Note that the Local Security Settings aren't available on all Vista PCs.)

The eight UAC settings are found under Local Policies > Security Options. You can find more about these settings on Microsoft's Windows Vista TechCenter, but I'll save you the time and trouble: you're better off leaving the settings as they are. UAC is far from perfect, but it's better than computing with no UAC at all.

If you're experiencing a UAC-related problem, Microsoft offers a list of potential solutions on its Help and Support site. For everyday computing, you're better off with UAC than without it.

Tomorrow: low-tech Office alternatives.

My Vista laptop kept losing its Internet connection when it came out of sleep mode. It turns out that the problem was related to the Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) Client service, or dhcpcsvc.dll, which tried to rewrite routing information to the network store interface. This caused a failed write operation that deleted the routing information.

Microsoft released the fix for the problem last September, though the patch didn't find its way onto my notebook until several months later. The machine's network link still hiccups for a few seconds when it comes out of sleep mode, but eventually, it restores the Internet connection on its own.

While this and other Windows patches won't address all the sleep and hibernation problems afflicting Windows users, your first step in solving problems with the operating system's power-saving modes is by downloading and installing the latest updates via the Windows Update service.

Here's a rundown of the most common glitches related to Windows' sleep and hibernation modes, and possible fixes.

Activate hibernation
If your PC has lost the ability to hibernate, you may have deleted your hibernation file when you ran Vista's Disk Cleanup utility. Regardless of why your system balks at entering hibernation mode, you can re-enable the feature via the Command Prompt: right-click the Command Prompt (it's located under Accessories on the Start menu), and choose Run as Administrator.

At the prompt, type powercfg -a and press Enter. You'll see a list of all the hibernation modes your system supports. Type powercfg -h on and press Enter to activate hiberation, or powercfg -h off to deactivate the function.

Keep the Hibernation File Cleaner option unchecked in Vista's Disk Cleanup utility to retain your PC's ability to hibernate.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Check Vista's power settings
In Vista, press the Windows key, type power options, and press Enter. Click "Change when computer sleeps" in the left pane, select "Change advanced power settings" at the bottom of the Edit Plan Settings dialog box, and click the plus sign to the left of Sleep to view your sleep and hibernate options. If the Hibernate option is missing from the Start menu's shut-down section, change the "Allow hybrid sleep" setting to Off.

Make sure Vista's "Allow hybrid sleep" option is off to place a Hibernate option on your shut-down menu.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Update your video driver
A common source of Vista hibernation woes is an out-of-date video driver. Slowly, video card makers are updating their drivers to work smoothly with Vista. Go to the Web site of your video adapter vendor, and look on its Support or Downloads page for an update to your model's driver. To find out which video card your PC uses, press the Windows key, type device manager, and press Enter. Click the plus sign to the right of Display adapters to view the model(s) installed in your system.

Look in the Event Viewer
To open Vista's Event Viewer, press the Windows key, type event viewer, and press Enter. Check the error logs for one occurring when the hibernation glitch struck. Search the Web for information about the Event ID, or click the Event Log Online Help link to go to a Microsoft Help and Support page.

Tomorrow: take advantage of free Office templates.