Windows Vista to XP: Advanced conversion guide
Steve Polak
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Oct 29, 2007 11:42 AM
Where's the #@$%? Device Manager in Windows Vista? Steve Polak exlains how to find all the system settings you know from Windows XP, in the sometimes confusing Vista interface.
Dialect is an interesting phenomenon, which has commonality in operating system interfaces. While travelling overseas recently, it again amused me how vastly different the English language is, depending on where you speak it. Chatting to an Irishman in Belfast, then an American in New York can cause you to throw out the rule book when it comes to speaking and being understood. While many points of reference are the same, there are also custom regional terms and slang differentiation that can make you feel as though you are speaking an entirely different language. Moving from an older version of Windows like XP to Windows Vista can result in a very similarly confusing experience. This is because while Vista attempts to use the same core terms as XP, the differences in how you actually “communicate” with your machine can be so great that you feel like the user interface is speaking a different language.
With this ‘master class’ tutorial we'll help you clear the muddy waters.
Windows Vista has really changed the way most of us use our PCs, but the basics are still there. You will still need to understand and use the Control Panel if you want to manage Vista so that it suits your needs. The Control Panel is really one of the first areas you should familiarize yourself with once you get the new operating system installed.
See also: PC Authority's basic guide to Vista for Windows XP usersControl or Chaos?
Accessing the Control Panel is actually easier using Vista when compared to older versions of Windows. In XP you have to navigate the Start bar submenu taking one more menu step than you do in Vista to open the Control Panel. In Vista you simply click the Start bar and it is there in plain view.
Once you open up the Control Panel you will notice a number of core menu buttons that you can use. These are quite different to those included with Windows XP and essentially Microsoft have simplified the process, trimming down the options and effectively making it harder for more experienced Windows users to find some of the setup options they have been used to working with in XP. That said, less experienced users will find the simpler menus more logical and less intimidating.
However if you want all of the clutter or are an experienced user who misses the control panel full with all of the options of XP, then you can revert to ‘classic’ mode. This is incredibly easy as there is a Classic menu option tag in the blue section to the left of the list of Control Panel items. So if you want to use the Control Panel in ‘old school’ mode the option is there.
For the moment, let’s assume you are going to work with the Control Panel in the new Vista mode. The first item along the top left of the array is the System Maintenance icon. This tab can be extremely useful once you get into the swing of streamlining Vista so that it runs more smoothly. You can use the many applications located in this section to fine tune performance and even backup files. When you click on System Maintenance you get access to a variety of extremely helpful and important processes and menus.
Let’s look at a few of these as we take a tour down the page.
At the top of the list is the Welcome Centre. This page is also setup so that it loads as a default when you first install Vista, so you have probably seen it before. The Welcome Centre is of interest if you want to know what wondrous features Vista has that are new. It is worth a look even if you can’t actually ‘do’ anything that useful in the Welcome Centre.
Below this is the Backup and Restore menu. This can be very useful once you have managed to get your system up and running and have stuff you’d like to protect and save.
Now, we’ll look in depth at the System area. You can do a lot of really useful stuff here. In the System menu you can monitor your hardware and make sure that everything is running right. You can also update your configuration, adding new hardware manually. This is an alternative to watching Vista auto detect your hardware and hoping it all works out correctly, something which does go fine a lot of the time, but not always. So if like the idea of being more ‘hands on’ you can add hardware and do many other cool things in the System menu.
First off when you open the System menu you will be able to easily determine exactly your PC’s hardware configuration. There is a detailed list featuring how much memory it has as well as a number of other key details. Now before you can say, “the System menu in Windows XP used to do all of this”, there are new goodies too. In Vista you get all of that basic information, but your PC also has the ability to self test and come up with a performance evaluation.
This score can be a very useful indication of how well your PC is working. You can click on the system rating index and your machine will even show you how well it is doing when it comes to areas like Processor, Memory, Graphics, Gaming and Hard Drive performance. This is cool and we will go into more detail about how you best tweak your machine so it funs faster in a later tutorial. For the moment a good look at the basic system functions is more useful, especially if you are just getting to know your machine.
On the left of this information panel there is also a menu tab that contains several juicy System options.
See also: PC Authority's basic guide to Vista for Windows XP users
The first of the system options is the Device Manager. This area performs the same sort of functions as it did in Windows XP. Open the Device Manager and you can see all of the hardware that is a part of your configuration. You can also see if any of your devices are highlighted with an exclamation or question mark, which indicates that there is a problem. If you do find items highlighted this way, double-click on them and select the Troubleshoot option to see what the problem is. Hopefully Vista can help you came up with a solution. You can also right click on the item and you will be able to examine the properties as well as check on the status of the device’s driver. Often this will be the source of problem.
If you are using a new hardware device, or you have just upgraded your PC to run Vista, but haven’t installed new Vista specific drivers for your hardware devices then this is often why problems arise.
Don’t panic though as the early days when few drivers were available for hardware devices running Vista are finally behind us! These days most hardware manufacturers will have Vista native drivers for their devices. This might get a little difficult when looking for drivers for older devices, especially printers and scanners, but for the most part you will be able to solve your hardware problem and get the device working without too much agony.
All you need do is click on the Update Driver option once you have selected the hardware device that is proving problematic and often Vista will find the right website or even the driver itself.
Also when thinking of hardware and possible problems with your PC updating the video drivers is absolutely worth investigating. You can do this by selecting on the hardware device in the System area, and you should be able to find the latest driver in the same manner as described above. However you can also click on the Windows Update menu item in your Start Bar menu and often Windows Update will search for drivers and present you with new video drivers in an ‘optional’ update section on the webpage. Grabbing video drivers, and for that manner a variety of other updates, this way is the easiest way forward.
Finally if you have your machine already up and running, but want to add new hardware this is actually pretty painless with Vista. The miracle of USB (Universal Serial Bus) has really helped make introducing new hardware to your machine so much easier. USB detected hardware worked well with Windows XP and Vista makes this process even simpler.
Let’s say you are adding a new scanner. First, attach the power lead to the machine (naturally!) and pop the USB input lead in the USB slot in the back of your PC while the machine is on. Now if you head back to the Control Panel and select the ‘classic’ mode you can also quickly and more directly access the Add Hardware menu.
Next click on the menu and select ‘continue’ so that Vista can try and find your new hardware. If it is successful then the process is quite easy. Click ‘finish’ and follow the prompts to install the hardware. You might then want to use the Devices menu to look for a newer driver in the means described above.
However if your PC is in a less than co-operative mood and the Add Hardware wizard fails to find your new hardware device then you have to check with the vendor’s website to see if they have any Vista drivers for the hardware.
If so then download and install and the problem should be solved. These days most vendors have drivers for most of their more current hardware, so you should be able to solve the problem even if it isn’t as easy as you’d hoped.
All roads lead to. . . . . .?
Returning to the System area, there are a few other useful submenus you might consider using. Below the device manager on the menu list on the left of the System screen you will find the menu tabs; Remote Settings, Protection Settings and the Advanced Settings. The funny thing is that all three menu items actually open the same submenu dialogue, even if they open it with different menu tabs selected.
So while it might feel like you are opening three unique options, you are really taking three different roads to the one place. That said the destination is a useful one. The System Properties tab that you can open is one of the most helpful as it features an option that you can select to quickly and easily backup a previous image of your PC’s system configuration. This backup can then be retrieved if your PC has a problem or meltdown later and you’d rather restore it to an earlier time when tranquility and system integrity reigned. You can simply click on the Create option, name the restore point you are creating (using the date as a part of this name is always wise) and a backup point will be born. This is most useful, especially if you are about to make major system configuration changes and would like to know that you have a safety net.
See also: PC Authority's basic guide to Vista for Windows XP users
Tinkering with Vista's Advanced System Properties
The Advanced System Properties tab can also be very useful in helping you to customize your PC and squeeze the best performance out of it. When you click on this tab there is an option for you to adjust your Vista machine so that you can help it perform better by turning off some of the ‘Aero’ Visual Effects. You can simply click on general configuration options that adjust your system to ‘best performance’ or ‘best appearance’ or you can get clicking and select individual effects you’d like to switch on or off.
Choosing to have these effects disabled or running will have an impact on how quickly your machine runs. Play around with these settings and you might find they have an impact, particularly if your machine is struggling for horsepower when it comes to graphic performance with all of the bells and whistles enabled.
Performance options: Advanced tab
Within Performance Options There is an ‘advanced’ tab that lets you choose which programs are more critical to your needs. If you’d rather have the ‘background’ processes run more quickly than the programs you are using there is also a tab to select this. We reckon in 99% of cases this is a pretty useless option, unless you are using your PC for some serious background processing. In this menu you can also adjust your Virtual Memory. This is something that experienced Windows users may want to do and it can be quite useful.
Increasing your ‘virtual memory’ cache frees up hard drive space to come to the aid of your memory Ram chips, giving them more temporary storage space for calculations. Essentially increasing your Virtual Memory cache can sometimes help your PC run more smoothly, especially when you are taxing its horsepower severely. The downside is you will be using hard drive space to help do this and Virtual Memory is never as fast or efficient as adding extra ‘real’ memory in the form of more Ram. However it might be worth trying if you think you need a little more power.
To do this click on the option to change the Virtual Memory and then when the dialogue opens up deselect the tab that indicates your PC will automatically handle this. Then select the hard drive you want to want to ‘borrow’ memory from and click on Custom Size, typing in the maximum and minimum values you’d like to work with. Be careful not to increase the maximum value by too much, especially if you are low on hard drive space and you should never reduce the minimum value below the 16 megabytes that Vista sets as a default value. If unsure or this has a detrimental effect on performance just revert to the option that sees Vista automatically handling this process.
So there you have it. A quick but useful tour of the System tab and some of the more helpful tweaks you can experiment with.
See also: PC Authority's basic guide to Vista for Windows XP users
Now, to make it feel like home...
Having sorted your basic system configuration and installed the few items of essential hardware you have you might want to now remake Vista in your own image. Well not exactly, but you can change the look of Vista to suit your personal taste. You can change the way Vista opens folders, which fonts it uses, how the sidebar works, what colours are used and how the task bar and start bar look. This stuff if all very simply modified.
This is all done by accessing the Appearance and Personalisation menu again found in that most wonderful of areas, the Control Panel. If you are not so keen to locate it this or prefer the easiest route you can also just right click on any unused landscape on your Desktop background screen and at the bottom of the dialogue that pops up there is also a tab that takes you to the Personalisation menu. Accessing this is like right clicking on the Windows XP Properties tab when you right click on the Desktop, except that the Personalisation menu gives you more options when it comes to fine tuning aesthetics.
There is a colour tuning menu, an option to change screen savers and you can also select your own desktop background. This stuff was all more or less available using XP’s Properties tab. However with Vista there are more options and you can change things more easily. You can also add new elements like unique mouse pointers and audio cues. XP did let you personalise your system in a similar way, but the menus weren’t integrated as well and you’d miss these options if you didn’t know where to look. They were also not as elegant or comprehensive.
As an example try changing some of your sounds using Vista. You just click the Sound menu option and you can change your speaker and playback options easily while also adding new sounds by recording them with a microphone, playing a CD or simply utilising the audio playing through your sound card. These sound bytes can then be browsed using the Sound Scheme dialogue and included as a part of your configuration’s audio notification response to various Vista events.
D’Oh!
If you want to throw a hundred sound bites from The Simpsons TV show into the mix you can do it here, and truly ‘Homerise’ your PC. Just watch an episode on DVD and use your windows Sound Recorder to grab the audio and you are away. Unfortunately unless you have a third party audio recorder you will have to use the very basic program that comes with Vista. This is oddly not found in the Sound Recorder section of the Windows Personalisation menu. The settings for your sound sources are found here and these are useful, but if you want to grab snippets of audio for your new soundscape you will need to go to the Start bar, click on Accessories and then click on the Sound Recorder tab there. An easier option would be to find a web page where there are plenty of Simpsons sound bytes and just download these.
Returning to the Personalisation menu you can also use the Display Settings tab at the bottom of this menu to determine the correct graphics drivers, and yet again this is another way you can also update your graphics drivers, as there is a menu tab here that handles this as well. You just click on Advanced Settings and then Adaptor and after this select the Properties tab and you’ll be able to once again do driver hunting with ease, uninstalling, disabling, updating of even rolling back your graphics drivers. You can even change your display settings configuration so your PC will support a dual monitor approach.
The Personalisation options Vista delivers are powerful, flexible and can help make using your PC more fun, so try them out. You know you want to!
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Vista Control Panel
Page 3: Vista Device Manager
Page 4: Advanced Vista tinkering
Page 5: Personalising Vista
See also: PC Authority's basic guide to Vista for Windows XP users