If you have upgraded Windows or, sometimes, when you have reinstalled it, you will be asked to select which version of Windows you want to run when it boots up on a screen like this:

If you only ever use one version of Windows you can switch this off, or you can reduce the countdown time before it continues automatically.

To do this right-click on your ‘My Computer’ icon and select ‘Properties’ (alternatively, hold down the Windows key and press the Pause/Break key), select the ‘Advanced’ page, and press the ‘Settings’ button in the ‘Startup and Recovery’ section.

From here you can switch off that selection screen by unticking ‘Time to display the list of operating systems’. You can also adjust the time that the screen will be shown before it automatically continues, and you can change the default version of Windows (or indeed any other operating system you have set up on your PC).

There are lots of process in windows which keeps on running in the background using some share of windows resources all the time.

These process are most of the time are not use full to all of us, one of those process is wmpnscfg.exe

What is wmpnscfg.exe?

wmpnscfg.exe is used to alert users when a new media device is found on the network. When wmpnscfg is notified that a new media device is available on the network, it displays a popup in the system tray that informs the user about the availability of the new device. (more…)

Tags: availability, how to, media, Microsoft, Network, program, startup, system, task…

Windows Vista no longer starts after you install an earlier version of the Windows operating system in a dual-boot configuration.“If you install an earlier version of the Windows operating system on a Windows Vista-based computer, Windows Vista no longer starts. In this case, only the earlier version of the Windows operating system starts.“

Why This Occur ?

These issues occur because earlier versions of the Windows operating system are incompatible with the new Windows Vista startup method.

…

I ran across a post on the Vista Compatibility Team Blog entitled “SetThreadPriority from Run key” that discusses a change in Vista whereby calling SetThreadPriority from an application launched from the Startup folder and the “Run” key in the registry will not cause the thread’s priority to be increased.

Wanting to verify and play around with this, I wrote a simple program that called SetThreadPriority to set the priority of the thread to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST. The program then immediately called GetThreadPriority to determine if the call to SetThreadPriority had any effect. Next, in a loop, the program then called SetThreadPriority / GetThreadPriority until either an error was encountered, or GetThreadPriority returned the expected priority. The program logged before and after each call to SetThreadPriority / GetThreadPriority the time, the action, and the either the parameters or the return value.

I set the program to be launched automatically by placing a shortcut in the “Startup” folder, and rebooted. Once the system came back up, I waited a bit and then examined the log. The first call to SetThreadPriority( GetCurrentThread(), THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST ); returned TRUE. The first call to GetThreadPriority( GetCurrentThread() ); returned 0 indicating THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL. In other

…

One thing which has always annoyed me about Windows is its inability to pick up and recognise nvidia raid sets (created by the nvidia raid bios utility). Windows XP and much earlier versions of Windows Vista I beta tested (CTP’s 50 and below) required that you have a 3rd party driver provided by the motherboard manufacturer. Having this nvidia raid driver (usually called nvraid) hanging around on a floppy drive was always inconvenient. I had long removed floppy drives from my computers years ago because I just didn’t need them. With Windows XP I would slip stream the nvidia raid drivers into a Windows XP installation using nlite so that I wouldn’t have to muck around with the normal F6 business during windows startup.

Skip forward to the present day of Windows Vista release January 30th. Windows finally just recognises my nvraid array. Such a little thing yet such a big win in convenience.