On a tablet computer that is running Windows Vista, you play a slide show in Windows Photo Gallery. When the slide show is playing, you use the Tablet PC Settings component in Control Panel to change the screen orientation. After you change the screen orientation, the screen goes black.

The typical non-technical computer user doesn’t want to see extra information about what the computer is doing as it will probably just confuse them. That’s why modern OS’s hide most of what’s going on underneath and just show pretty pictures and allow users to point and click on things. The more technical users, often called Geeks (I put myself in this category) like to type in commands, and see what is going on behind the scene. What better way to display your Geekness, and impress your friends with your technical prowess than to have your computers boot screen scrolling all kinds of technical information? Keep reading →

While the old ‘Prnt Scrn’ still works in Vista to capture the entire screen to the clipboard, you then need to paste that image into a program so you can grab the part you want, and save it to disk. Vista’s new Snipping Tool simplifies this task.
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I was just starting to write a bit about the User Account Control (UAC) feature of Vista. I wanted to show an example of how it dims the screen and shows a prompt when you do certain things, like trying to run a .reg file. To my suprise, I wasn’t able to capture a UAC dialog box (running Vista RC2), the Prnt Scrn key seems to be unusable while the screen is dimmed. Go ahead, give it a try, and if you find a way around it, let me know here by leaving a comment!