You can disable the—sometimes annoying—User Account Control (UAC) prompts for members of the Administrators group, while leaving them active for limited user accounts. This is great if you don’t want others accessing or changing system settings. Disabling the alerts, however, requires editing the Windows Registry:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Name: ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 Enable, 1 Disable

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A useful trick in Vista is being able to right-click on an item, select Send To, and then send the item to your Documents folder, a mail recipient, a USB drive, and so on. One thing I’d like to do however is be able to send an item to Notepad. For example, if I want to view an XML file, I’d rather view it in Notepad than in Internet Explorer. You can add a shortcut to Notepad (or to anything else) simply by opening Explorer and navigating to the hidden folder C:\Users\your_account\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo, then create a new shortcut to Notepad.exe in this location.

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Windows PE is a fully-functional (though scaled-down) version of Vista, and as such you can modify it using scripts and other techniques. One popular modification is creating menus in Windows PE to ease the task of deploying Vista. To make doing this even easier, check out PMenu, a third-party tool that makes it easy to create menus in Windows PE.

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Vista’s Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) lets you capture and deploy Windows Image (WIM) files using the imagex.exe command. Unfortunately imagex.exe is a command-line utility whose syntax can be somewhat cryptic at times. Well, where there’s a UI, there’s a way, right? Check out this third-party tool which is currently under development, and keep your eye out for it once it’s finished and hosted somewhere for download.

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Vista’s new image-based Windows Image (WIM) file format lets you do some cool things. For example, you can edit the registry of a Vista image you’ve already captured from a reference computer. Here’s how you do this:

• Mount the image using a command something like this:
• imagex /mountrw install.wim 1 c:\mount
• Load the registry hive you want to edit using a command something like this (which loads the HKLM\software hive):
• reg load HKLM\temphive c:\mount\windows\system32\config\software
• Open regedit.exe and edit the keys and values in HKLM\temphive as desired.
• Unload the hive you previously loaded using a command like this:
• reg unload HKLM\temphive
• Unmount the .wim file and commit the changes using a command like this:
• imagex /unmount /commit c:\mount

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