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By Brian Livingston Our esteemed editor, Fred Langa, is taking a much-deserved sabbatical to ride his motorcycle coast-to-coast across the U.S. and back through Canada — and YOU can win a day with him, free. Every subscriber, free and paid, can enter to win one of Fred Langa's patented Housecalls, with the master himself riding up to optimize your PC, scan it for viruses, and more.

At least four Housecalls will be given away

Fred has agreed to select three or more subscribers who live in the contiguous United States, plus at least one in the southern Canadian provinces. (No, he's not biking to Honolulu, London, or Baffin Island, OK?) Here's all you need to know to enter Fred's contest.

Step 1. Be a subscriber. If you're not already a subscriber to the Windows Secrets Newsletter, first get a free subscription by using the following link:

Get a subscription

Step 2. Enter to win. Any subscriber, free or paid, can use the following link to enter the contest. Entries will be accepted Apr. 19 through 25:

• Enter to win a Housecall from Fred Langa

All we ask is that you supply a reason why you'd like Fred to visit you, and provide us with your general location. Fred himself will make the final selection and notify the winners by May 31. We'll notify everyone about the winning entries in our June 7 newsletter. Fred's Housecalls will occur in July and August.

Step 3. What fine print? Like any contest, we're required to publish our contest rules, so there you go. (The main restrictions are that we can't award any prizes to applicants who are under 18, and we can't select those who live in Québec, a province that requires registration and fees for contests of any type.)

That's it! I hope you'll enter today.

Riding into the sunset across the continent

Fred and his wife, Michelle, are shown in the photo at left on one of his favorite bikes. Fred will be riding in the breeze and sleeping in campgrounds from New Hampshire to the West Coast to Montréal, feeling footloose and computer-free. (Michelle will be flying in to join Fred on occasion, but she isn't part of the Housecalls, sorry.)

Fred has been making Housecalls ever since he offered them in his LangaList newsletter on May 21, 2005. One of his visits was written up on Oct. 6, 2005.

Fred's forthcoming sabbatical this summer means that he won't be writing for Windows Secrets again until September 2007. At that time, he promises to provide us with an irregular series of columns describing what he learned during his labors on behalf of the contest winners. The newsletter is supporting his travels, in part, by paying for his screeds, which should be highly amusing.

When I heard that Fred would go out cruising this summer, I felt a sense of loss at first. But then I realized that anyone who wrote the LangaList newsletter for nine years, and then did Windows Secrets every week after our two newsletters merged in 2006, deserves to get away. I hope you'll give your blessing to his new adventure.

Even more great content coming your way

In honor of Fred's midlife crisis, I'm promoting him to the new title of editor-at-large, so he can contribute whenever and wherever he likes. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just work that much harder to deliver to you our weekly jolt of tips and tricks.

To keep the secrets of Windows flowing, I've promoted Scott Dunn to the position of associate editor. As you may recall, he wrote the LangaList Plus section in the paid version of the newsletter as a contributing editor last November and December before taking a leave of absence.

Scott previously worked full-time as a senior editor at Adobe Systems and has published a monthly column in PC World tirelessly for an incredible 15 years. Starting next week, he'll be writing our lead stories, such as his report on how to buy Windows software at half-price that appeared in our Apr. 12 issue. In addition, he'll be running a reader-response column to answer your questions — all in the free version of the newsletter.

To whip our weekly content into shape, Jody Braverman has come on board as our new managing editor. She moved to Seattle to work with us after three years in Shanghai, where she was managing editor of EuroBiz Magazine, an English-language publication on foreign business in China.

With her help, our scribblings will sound even gooder.

We'll still have regular columns from our contributing editors, including Susan Bradley, Mark Edwards, Woody Leonhard, Chris Mosby, Ryan Russell, and even more on the way in the paid version of the newsletter.

We're excited about the great tricks we'll be able to bring you in the months to come. First, though, be sure to use the links above to enter Fred's contest and support his travels.

Ride safely, my friend. And watch out for bugs.

Contents  Index

By Fred Langa There's some highly questionable advice about Vista out on the Web. Take it with a grain of salt. You'll get a much better idea of what Vista's really like by ignoring the most extreme commentaries for and against the new operating system.

Should we just forget about Vista?

A Windows Secrets reader named Howard wrote in to ask about some advice he read on a popular PC tune-up Web site. The site recommended to its readers that they buy an XP computer, while that operating system is still available, and "forget about Vista."

No operating system is perfect. If perfection were the necessary standard for adopting an OS, we would all still be using the abacus. But wait! Abacus beads can give you splinters, so maybe we should just use our fingers and toes...

Vista has its warts, just like any other OS. But I'd personally have no qualms at all about buying a new notebook or PC that comes with Vista preinstalled. In fact, that's actually a pretty good way of avoiding the driver hassles that almost always occur with a major new release of an OS. If the hardware comes with Vista preinstalled and ready to run, you already have the drivers you need. Once you have Vista, then you can avoid the pitfalls and maximize the positives by using the information in this newsletter and in Brian's Windows Vista Secrets book to tune and tweak your copy of Vista.

The pros and cons of upgrading an older system to Vista are a little less clear. Driver hassles are more common than I thought they'd be, given Vista's long gestation. (What the heck were hardware makers doing all that time?) But, if your PC meets the Vista compatibility recommendations, as shown on Microsoft's hardware compatibility page, you shouldn't have any problems.

So, saying "forget about Vista" is sensationalistic and simplistic. Of course, the appearance of Vista didn't suddenly make XP obsolete. XP remains a mainstream operating system. If you're running a well-tuned, stable copy of XP and it meets your needs, there's no four-alarm reason to drop everything and upgrade to Vista right away. But that's not the same thing as saying we should forget about Vista completely.

Make no mistake, sooner or later, Vista is in your future. All of Microsoft's products have a defined and published "life cycle," and Microsoft will "retire" full support for XP Home and Professional on Apr. 14, 2009. That's just two years from now.

XP will continue to work after that date, of course. But you can think of Apr. 14, 2009, as the date when Microsoft's support attentions will turn away from XP. For the next five years thereafter (until 2014), online self-help for XP (e.g., the Knowledge Base) will remain available. Microsoft may, if it chooses, continue to release critical patches and updates.

But one way or another, if you want to continue to work with a Windows operating system, you will have to make friends with Vista. Therefore, I think it's just plain bad advice — downright silly, in fact — to say "forget about Vista." But it's also silly to say, "You're doomed unless you upgrade to Vista immediately." Both extremes are wrong.

Upgrade to Vista in the normal course of your hardware and software purchases. Then, with the good information provided by Brian and the contributors to this newsletter, you'll be able to use Vista as safely, enjoyably, and productively as possible.

How to determine which cookies can be deleted

If you've poked around in your browser's settings, you've probably discovered an easy way to see what cookies are being stored on your system. For example, in IE 7, click Tools, Internet Options, then in the Browsing History section, click Settings, View Files. In Firefox, it's Tools, Options, Privacy, Cookies, View Cookies. If you haven't done a cleanup in a while, you'll probably find a pile of cookies waiting for you.

Cookies are just ASCII text files created via your browser by Web sites you visit. Some cookies are very useful, storing login information for the Web sites you frequent, the date of your last visit (so the site can flag newer information for you), your favorite search terms, and so on. These cookies are worth saving. Other cookies really only benefit Web advertisers, and can be deleted with no negative consequences to you. But how do you tell which cookies are which?

Because cookies are plain text files, they can be opened and read with Notepad. Even so, the data stored inside a cookie may not be very easy to figure out.

That's where a tool like Karen Kenworthy's free Cookie Viewer can help. Cookie Viewer works with Internet Explorer and Firefox cookies, and presents all of a cookie's data in a comprehensive but easy-to-understand way. You can see when the cookie was created, by whom, when it expires, and more. The program also lets you delete any cookies you don't want.


Figure 1. Cookie Viewer lets you see all the data a cookie contains, so you can delete the ones you don't want.

Firefox users can also use any of several cookie-viewing add-ons, such as the free View Cookies download.

Once you know what cookies you want to keep, managing them becomes much simpler. For example, you can mark the cookies you want to keep as read-only, mass-delete the rest, and then clear the preserved cookies' read-only attribute.

Another alternative is to copy the cookies you want to preserve to a safe place, mass-delete the rest, and then copy the cookies back. If you have any skill with batch files or other scripting tools, you can easily automate this process.

There's also a huge number of cookie managers available for sale on the Web, but I've never found them particularly useful. As you can see from the above, managing cookies manually isn't particularly difficult. The first time you do it can be somewhat time-consuming, but subsequent cleanups can be easy and lightning-fast.

More on accessing Device Manager

The many ways you can accomplish tasks in Windows is one of the operating system's greatest strengths and, at the same time, one of its biggest drawbacks. Some see it as a weakness, because it can make Windows harder to learn and use. It's true that it makes our jobs at Windows Secrets more difficult, because it means that there are several ways of explaining how to access or manipulate different features.

For example, a few readers had trouble with the how-to instructions I gave on Apr. 5 for accessing Device Manager via Control Panel, Performance & Maintenance, System, Hardware, Device Manager.

The above process works for Control Panel's default Category View. But, if you're using the Classic View, the category headings, such as Performance and Maintenance, are not shown. Instead, you simply see a list of individual Control Panel applets. In Control Panel's Classic View, the clickstream to access Device Manager would be Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager.

But that just scratches the surface of the many ways to open Device Manager. You can also get to Device Manager by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Properties from the context menu. From there, you click Hardware and then Device Manager.

Or, you can click Start, Run and then enter devmgmt.msc in the Run box. (In Vista, simply enter devmgmt.msc in the Search box.

Or, you can click Start, Run and then enter mmc to open the Microsoft Management Console. Once inside the Console, you can navigate to the Console plug-ins, usually located in /Windows/System32. You can recognize them by the .msc file extension.

For that matter, you can browse directly to the /Windows/System32 folder in Explorer and click on any .msc file to open that plug-in.

Or, use Windows' Search function to find all *.msc files, then click on the one you want from the search results list.

There are probably other ways to get there, too. You can see why we can't possibly list every way of accomplishing a task in every article — there isn't enough space or time!

The flexibility that Windows provides means that you can do things in the manner that feels most natural to you, whether this be typed commands or point-and-click navigation. This is one of the things I like most about Windows.

So, if a how-to instruction doesn't fit your situation exactly, don't worry. It's actually an artifact of one of Windows' most positive attributes: its incredible flexibility. If you don't find the exact answer you're looking for here, a little spelunking in the Windows Help system or online will almost surely find you a solution.

Hasta la vista, amigos!

As Brian explained in his introduction to this newsletter, after 30 years of tech writing (and 25 years specifically and continuously in computers), it's time for me to take a break. With the approach of good weather, I'll soon be heading out on an extended trip around North America by motorcycle.

My wife will join me for some of the trip, but the rest will be solo and will include some backcountry travel and camping. It should be restorative, and quite an adventure. With no firm schedule for the trip, this will be my first time in three decades without publication deadlines setting the pace. I'm looking forward to seeing what that feels like!

As Brian also explained, I hope to meet some of you in my travels. (Please see the introduction and follow the directions to send in your name.) I'll be back in the newsletter at the end of the summer, and look forward to sharing my experiences with all of you.

Hope to see you along the way! 

Contents  Index

Contents  Index

As if you need any more convincing that some people have way too much time on their hands, check out Yoga Kitty, a tongue-in-cheek Web site purportedly aimed at helping you and your pet cat enjoy the benefits of yoga, together. The centerpiece of the project is a handful of downloadable videos (in English and French) demonstrating a human-kitty team clearing past karmas, exploring meditation, and dispelling static cling. T-shirts and video tapes available. More info

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