Keeping an organized start menu is something that doesn’t even occur to most computer users. As more programs are installed on your machine, more shortcuts icons appear in the start menu until, eventually, it becomes frustratingly time-consuming to find the shortcut you need. Although, since Windows Vista, the new start menu design has helped to alleviate this problem to some degree, having an organized start menu still provides a number of benefits. It is far more convenient and easier to find things if all of the entries in your start menu are organized and arranged into categories.

The latest version of Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows 7, is one of the most efficient computer operating systems available today. It’s not only user-friendly, but also secure in many respects. Although it has user interface elements very similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 has much better security in place. In this article, let’s analyze these security features in detail.

Since Windows XP, multilingual computing has become considerably easier to achieve. With the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can choose from a wide variety of interface languages. This is especially useful for those whose native language is not yet available in an off-the-shelf copy of Windows. It is also useful for those who have an English language edition of Windows but want to be able to use the operating system in their own language.

The Control Panel in Windows 7 is a great improvement over its Vista and XP predecessors, but it is still far from perfect. Considering it is boldly name a ‘control’ panel, there are still many things that users are unable to actually access from this folder. Admittedly, not everyone wants to control every aspect of their Operating System and have an all-in-one master access, but for those that require more command over the Window 7 features, there is a way to create an all-seeing Control Panel.

So, you’ve turned off the Aero interface, changed your power settings, adjusted indexing, reduced the number of startup programs, and cleaned the hard disk. All of these tasks can improve Vista performance, but what if you want to take your tweaking to the next level? There’s more you can do to improve Vista’s speed.

Bitlocker, the new security scheme in Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7, helps encrypt the entire system drive. This security feature requires an extra hard disk partition of about 1.5 GB of free space for the installation of unencrypted boot data, to enable booting from the encrypted system drive. If you overlooked this and installed Vista without creating this additional partition, you can follow this article to get Bitlocker installed. I assume that you have some experience with Windows installation. If not, it is recommended to have a technically knowledgeable person near you.

In previous articles we've shown how to use the Sync Center to synchronize your files with mobile devices or across network locations. When this tool is used, you will see either a Sync Center icon in your taskbar or a mobsync.exe process running at each Windows Vista startup. However, if you stop using it Sync Center will continue to run at each startup. In order to free up memory for other processes, it is best to disable it when no longer used. In this article I will show you how to do this and optimize your Windows Vista startup.

Windows Vista's launch was a very troubled one with plenty of issues which quickly created a very negative image for this operating system. Six months after its launch, we ran a survey to identify the top problems users were confronted with. The results were very clear. Our readers said that the top issues were the lack of proper drivers (36% of votes) and application compatibility issues (36% of votes). These two, combined with a very weak offering of security solutions seriously impacted their user experience.

In this article I will go through each of these areas and share with you the current status on Windows Vista plus the outlook for the upcoming Windows 7 launch. Will Windows 7 share the same issues at launch?

The Sync Center is a very useful tool which can be used to synchronize files between your PC and network locations or mobile devices such as portable music players, USB memory sticks or cellphones. In this article I will show you where to find this tool, how to setup and modify a sync partnership between your PC and a mobile device, how to view or delete already defined partnerships and how to view sync results and conflicts.