A couple of more random thoughts about Windows Vista

I posted an item a couple of days ago describing my experiences with using Windows Vista, and I wanted to post an update with a couple of additional items that I noticed this weekend, and also provide an update about one of the items that I previously mentioned that some readers posted solutions to in the comments on my other post.

I mentioned that it frustrated me to have Internet Explorer 7 open a blank page each time I create a new tab. Fortunately, there is a setting that you can use to change that, and I just hadn't dug around enough to find it yet. If you press the Alt key, the classic menu system will appear. Then you can choose Tools | Internet Options, then click the Settings button in the Tabs section. In the Tabs Settings dialog, there is a check box that is off by default that is title Open home page for new tabs instead of a blank page. Checking that and pressing OK provided me the behavior I was looking for!

I have also noticed a couple of other odd behaviors that I didn't previously list. The first one is something I run into all of the time on the test machines in my office and I can't believe I forgot about it because it really drives me nuts. In previous versions of Windows, you can open a command prompt and then drag and drop files onto it to force the full path of the file to be displayed in the command prompt window. I use this technique a lot to run a setup package with command line switches. In Windows Vista, dragging and dropping a file onto a command prompt does not do anything, so I have to open the folder that contains the file in Windows Explorer and then copy and paste the folder name and paste it into the command prompt. This is a pretty minor scenario in general, but it happened to be one that I used all of the time and I can't think of a reason offhand why this would have been changed.

The second item I just noticed today is that each time I open Outlook to read my email, the Outlook window opens in windowed mode instead of being maximized. In older versions of Windows, it remembered the windowed or maximized state from the previous time I closed Outlook and opened it the same way each time I launch it in the future.