Improve your experience in Windows Vista with my FREE TOP 10 recommended downloads.

1. MZ Vista Force is a system tweaker. Use it to accelerate performance, juice your browsing speed, clean up your hard disk, clear out bandwidth-wasting startup programs, and even fine-tune Windows Media Player and Explorer. Many of the settings here are exceedingly fine-grained. Want to change the speed at which the Start menu search displays? With Mz Vista Force, you can. Download Mz Vista Force.

2. Vista Boot Logo Generator allows you to change it easily your boot screen with one that you created yourself or with a graphic that you find online. You’ll have to create or find the image in two sizes: 1024 by 768 pixels, and 800 by 600 pixels. Both must be in .bmp format, at 24-bit color depth. Once you have them this utility replaces your boot screen with them. Download Vista Boot Logo Generator.

3. EasyBCD is a bootloader modification tool for Windows Vista with many advanced options for beginners and power users alike. It gives the user full control over everything that happens during Vista startup and can boot into Ubuntu (Linux), OS X, BSD, etc! Download EasyBCD 1.7

4. TweakUAC One annoyance I mention in a previous post of mine that Windows Vista has is it’s User Account Control (UAC), which nags at you to enter a password or click OK every time you make certain changes or perform certain common actions. You can turn UAC off in Vista if you’d like, but that leaves your system vulnerable. So you might prefer to turn it on at times and off at other times. TweakUAC lets you quickly and easily switch UAC on and off.
Download TweakUAC.

5. Amnesty Generator lets you convert almost any online widget or gadget to a Vista-compatible gadget that you can then run on the Sidebar.
Download Amnesty Generator.

6. vLite lets you remove Vista components that are hard to get rid off. It also lets you tweak Vista in various ways, such as turning Aero on even if your hardware says it can’t be run. Once you’ve switched off components and tweaked the operating system to your heart’s content, vLite helps you create a Vista installation DVD containing your new stripped-down operating system. Download vLite

7. Windows Clippings is for capturing screen shots in Vista, unlike the built in vista Snippet Tool , Windows Clippings can save to an array of formats, and it includes a particularly important feature for capturing Vista screens the ability to capture window shadows. To use it, press the Print Screen key, click the window you want to capture, and then double-click. You can instruct the program to prompt you each time to tell it where you want to save a file, or you can designate a specific folder to receive all screen shots. For basic screen captures, the free version works fine. Download Windows Clippings

8. Feed Plus. If you use IE 7 and the RSS blog reader built into it, you will like this enhancement from Microsoft. It enables you to read all of your feeds from a single location, instead of having to read one feed at a time. This is especially useful for people like me who subscribe to dozens of feeds. Rather than wasting precious moments clicking from feed to feed, you’ll find them all in a single location. Download Feed Plus

9. Vista Battery Saver. If you use a laptop with Vista, then you may want to saves battery life on your Windows Vista PC. It automatically deactivates Windows Aero and the Windows Sidebar when your laptop runs on battery power, which the author claims will extend battery life. You can also have the program automatically turn off Aero or the Sidebar when your batter level drops below a limit that you set. Download Vista Battery Saver

10. CCleaner is one of my favourites. It combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files from your system and also a fully featured registry cleaner! CCleaner allows Windows to run faster, more efficiently and gives you more hard disk space. Download CCleaner

If you cant wait for the official Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, there are some recent alternatives. Just 2 days ago Microsoft released a reliability and performance update. Download each update individually directly from Microsoft right now. These updates are not available in the automated windows update, so get these while their hot!

If you want the Reliability update get here:
Windows Vista 32 bit version
Windows Vista 64 Bit version

If you want the Performance update get here:
Windows Vista 32 bit version
Windows Vista 64 bit version

Get ready to be shocked!

Have you been waiting for some worth while games for your DirectX compatible video card in Windows Vista?

There are some great game titles coming out this year, other than Halo 2 and Shadowrun that you can really get into. If you have Windows XP dont worry, I’ve head through The Inquirer that a hacking group has patches to make these DirectX10 Games work with DirectX9 in XP.

However here is the latest list of Windows Vista Games worth playing in my book:

HALO 2

Released Date: May 1, 2007

Halo 2 on the PC contains the original Halo 2 as well as the Multiplayer Map Pack and a level editor

Shadowrun
Released Date: May 29, 2007

FASA Studio has a first-person shooter for the PC, based on the old RPG of the same name.

Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures.
Release Date: November 2007

The barbarian have finally seized the throne of Aquilonia. But Conan’s rule is on the brink of chaos, spiraling towards the doom of ancient evils. In this twisted fantasy world, dark magic and brutal combat lurks around every corner, and each man and woman must carve their own unique destiny under Conan’s reign. In the true vision of Robert E. Howard’s dark universe it’s now time for you to become a messenger of death.

Alan Wake, the game’s protagonist, is a bestselling horror writer, who writes a novel about his darkest nightmares. In the game, those nightmares come true… The game features a massive, open world for the players to explore, with mission based exploration in the single player adventure.
Release Date: 2008

BioShock Release Date: August 2008
The game begins after your plane crashes into icy uncharted waters, you discover a rusted bathysphere and descend into Rapture, a city hidden beneath the sea. Constructed as an idealistic society for a hand picked group of scientists, artists and industrialists, the idealism is no more. Now the city is littered with corpses, wildly powerful guardians roam the corridors as little girls loot the dead, and genetically mutated citizens ambush you at every turn.

Gears of War
Release Date: later this 2007
A third-person tactical shooter from Epic, running on the Unreal Engine 3. Gears of War thrusts gamers into a deep and harrowing story of humankind’s epic battle for survival against the Locust Horde, a nightmarish race of creatures that surface from the bowels of the planet.

Hellgate: London
Release Date: Summer 2007
combines the depth of role-playing games and action of first-person titles, while offering infinite playability with randomly created levels, items and events.

And my all time favorite….

Unreal Tournament 3
Release Date: November 2008
The 3rd install marks the return of the premiere tournament-style first-person shooter. Unreal Tournament 3 unleashes the full power of Unreal Engine 3, taking graphics, gameplay, and challenge to a whole new level. Players engage in intense and hyper-real battles with other human players online or against incredibly realistic Unreal artificial intelligence. Over two dozen weapons and vehicles have been upgraded and enhanced