Resize a Partition for Free in Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes a built-in functionality in Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions. No more 3rd party utilities needed!
To get to this utility, open up Control Panel, and type in partition into the search box.. you'll immediately see the link show up:

Shrink a Partition

In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select "Shrink Volume" from the menu.
In the Shrink dialog, you will want to enter the amount you want to shrink by, not the new size. For example, if you want to shrink your 50gb partition by roughly 10gb so that it will now be roughly 40gb, enter 10000 into the box:

Extend a Partition

In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select "Extend Volume" from the menu.

On this screen, you can specify the amount that you want to increase the partition by. In this case, I'm going to extend it back to the roughly 50GB size that it was before.
Note that the extend partition feature only works with contiguous space.

Remove Old Drivers After Upgrading to New Hardware

If you are experiencing weird issues after upgrading your hardware, or you've just upgraded to the latest hardware device and aren't seeing the performance you'd like, you might want to remove the old drivers which are still installed for the old hardware, even though you can't normally see them in device manager.
What you have to do is set a less-known flag to allow you to see non-present devices, and then launch device manager. You'll then see the old devices in the list, and can uninstall the drivers for them.
In Windows Vista, the first thing you'll need to do is open a command prompt in administrator mode. Type cmd into the start menu search box, and then use Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open in administrator mode. (You can also right-click on the command prompt and choose Run as Administrator)
Now paste in the following line:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

Then type in devmgmt.msc to start up Device Manager from the administrator command prompt:

Once you are in Device Manager, go to the View menu and choose Show Hidden Devices, which will show all the device drivers including things that aren't currently installed in your computer.
Notice how I have 6 mice in the list, even though I only have two installed (and my drawing tablet). The other 3 mice are old mice that I've used until they died…. the Geek tends to wear through input devices very quickly since he never leaves the computer…

You can right-click on the driver and then choose Uninstall from the menu to remove the drivers for that old hardware.
I've found that this can resolve a lot of weird issues, and even increase performance on some machines where you've upgraded a ton of times. This isn't necessarily going to increase performance, but it's nice to have a tidy computer nonetheless.
This tip also works the same in Windows XP.

Turn on Remote Desktop in Windows Vista

Remote Desktop is disabled by default in Windows Vista, but it's easy enough to turn it back on. If you need to access your Vista PC from another box, it's an essential thing to turn on.

To get to the configuration page, you can either right-click the Computer icon and choose properties, or you can type in system into the start menu search box. It'll be the 4th item in the list, as you can see here:

Now you'll want to click the Remote Settings link on the left hand side:

Now you can finally turn it on:

To connect from another Vista PC on the same network, click the bottom radio button. If you need to connect from an XP/2k machine, click the "Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop" radio button.
Don't worry about setting up firewall rules, Vista does that for you automatically.
Note: This will not work for Home editions of Windows Vista.

Change Monitor Timeout From Command Line

It drives me crazy when my monitors turn off while I'm watching a movie. If you want to quickly change the monitor timeout using the command line, it's actually pretty simple.
The powercfg utility can be used on the command line to change power configuration settings, including the monitor timeout, which is what we'll use here.
The command syntax:
powercfg -Change -monitor-timeout-ac 120