After reading about the numerous problems with Vista, I was quite hesitant to try it in the workplace.  I work off a laptop at a client site as a software engineer for a major consulting company.  My job demands that I have 100% uptime with all applications and software development tools.  I can not afford to have stability issues or any kind of OS incompatibilities.  To make matters worse, we use 2 VPN clients, 4 different large software development tools and a suite of other smaller applications.  After installing Vista Business 64 on a new Lenovo T61p laptop, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

After having run Windows Vista (Business 64) for over a month now, I can say that with a few tweaks, I believe it is ready for full-time use.  I'm a full time consultant so I work off of a laptop in the field running a full suite of software about 10 hours per day.  This means that if my OS is misbehaving, I'm in big trouble because if I can't work, I can't bill my hours and if I can't bill my hours, I'm getting a serious call from the guys above. 

Despite all of the dogging of Vista from XP and 2000 users, I've found that I'm faster in my day-to-day activities than I was in Windows XP.  Here's my list of Vista must-knows:

I've configured and maintained over 100 UNIX-based servers over the years starting with Slackware Linux 2.0 back in 1995.  Over all course of all the deployments I've become very biased about my operating systems.  Linux clearly has a solid lead with desktop applications, but for server deployments and maintainability, I believe firmly in FreeBSD.

A friend of mine was recently hit with some malware that would put a little shield in the system tray of windows which would show reports of virus infections and all types of problems. Every time you click on it, it would open up a page for a product called Virus Protect Pro. Of course you have to pay for this, and what you're paying for is really a glorified uninstaller of their malware. Here's how to clean it from your system...

Quickly resizing images seems like a common and straight-forward enough task that one would think it should be built in to any modern operating system. Unfortunately, it doesn't come pre-packaged in any! I've tried context-menu (right click) plug-ins, batch processors and various scripts. My goal was to find the fastest and easiest image resizer for the given OS. Read on to find the best solutions for your platform.