Change the Number of Recent Items Shown on the Vista Start Menu

The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak. What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu.

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box, and then navigate down to the following key, creating it if it doesn’t exist.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.

Add a new DWORD 32-bit value named MaxRecentDocs into the right-hand pane, and then double-click to open it up.

To set the value, you’ll first need to change Base to Decimal, and then you can enter any value you want. For instance, if you want to set it to 20, enter that into the Value data field.

Change Start Menu to Use Small Icons in Windows Vista

Windows Vista uses large icons by default in the start menu.Right click on the start button, and select Properties.Then click the Customize button.Now scroll down all the way to the bottom. You should see a checkbox for Use large icons, which you’ll want to uncheck.

Built-in Quick Launch Hotkeys in Windows Vista

Windows Vista lets you use hotkeys for the first 10 items in the Quick Launch menu. These hotkeys are assigned automatically, so there’s no need to do anything other than understand how they work.

For each icon in the Quick launch bar, the hotkey Win + number is assigned. These are assigned from left to right, 1-9 (and 0 for 10).

Assign a Shortcut Key to the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes a screen capture/screenshot tool that is actually pretty decent. You can take region captures or full screenshots and easily save them using this tool.

The snipping tool doesn’t exist on every version of Vista. To turn it on, you’ll have to go to “Turn Windows features on or off” in Control Panel, and check the box for the Tablet PC utilities.

The only problem with this tool is that there’s no hotkey to bring up the window.

Bring up the Start Menu, and then click on All Programs. Click the Accessories folder, and you’ll see the Snipping Tool.Right click it and go to the Properties screen. You’ll see a Shortcut key text box:The only annoying thing with this trick is that you can’t use the PrintScreen key.  you can assign Ctrl + F12 because that’s something easy to remember that don’t use for anything else.

Add Internet Explorer 7 Icon to the Desktop in Windows Vista

The main benefit to using this icon instead of a shortcut is that you can quickly get to the Internet Options page by right-clicking and choosing Properties.

You’ll notice that you can also use “Start Without Add-ons”, which is helpful for troubleshooting problems.

To add this icon back, we’ll need to use a registry hack. You can  manually create the registry entries.

Open regedit.exe using the Start menu search or run box, and then navigate down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel

In the right-hand pane, add a new 32-bit DWORD value with the following name and value:

Key Name: {871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}

Value: 0

You should be able to right-click on the desktop and choose Refresh, and the new icon should show up.