Restoration comedy

Discover useful tweaks for Vista and XP users

Many readers must be dual-booting Vista and XP. I certainly am. It’s not hard to set up but as reader Gordon Edwards found out, there’s a catch. In the simplest situation, let’s say you have XP installed on drive C:, and you installed Vista on a separate NTFS partition, D:. When you boot to Vista these drive letters are reversed - Vista sees itself as C:, and the XP partition will be seen as D:.

Other partitions may also be re-lettered if Vista bumps them down the pecking order. This isn’t really a problem, though you may find that resources that are shared between the two operating systems - for example MS Office macros - might grind to a halt if they encounter a path reference using a remapped driver letter. What is a problem is that when you boot into XP, all your Vista restore points are deleted.

In addition, all previous versions of files are deleted, as are all but the latest Complete PC backup. So why does it happen? The official explanation is that when XP boots it automounts and examines each partition. If it comes across something it doesn’t recognise, it deletes it in order to maintain the partition’s integrity, without so much as a ‘Please wait while Windows destroys your restore points’ message.

You might think that if you set XP to ignore the Vista drive when creating its own restore points it would leave things alone. But that doesn’t work. Nor does hiding the drive in TweakUI. What does work is shutting down Vista then physically disconnecting the drive before booting to XP, but this is impossible if the partitions are on the same physical disk, and highly impractical with separate internal disks.

Another method is to use a third-party bootloader that will hide the Vista partition from XP, but this is not a trivial matter. Though Microsoft hasn’t released a hotfix for the problem, it acknowledges its existence and offers two solutions. The first involves a Registry edit.

In XP make a system restore point (note that the problem is not reciprocal and XP restore points survive a Vista boot) and then run Regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE \SYSTEM \MountedDevices. If there is an ‘Offline’ subkey, then open it. If not create it.

Then, in the Offline key, create a new DWORD value with the name \DosDevices\D: including the backslashes and, if necessary, substituting the drive letter of the Vista partition (as XP sees it) for D. Having named the value, double-click on it and set its value to 1.

This will hide the drive contents from XP – you’ll still see the drive letter in Explorer, but it will show no contents or label – and the restore points on the Vista partition will be untouched. One point to note is that if you have partitions other than the XP and Vista system volumes on which you keep data accessible to both operating systems, you should not include these in system restore on either version of Windows.

The other method is for Ultimate and Enterprise users only. If you turn on the Vista Bitlocker feature, then this will also hide and protect the volume from XP’s meddling, without having to take any action in XP.

Another one bites the dust
One of the better new features that came with Windows Millennium (yes, there were some) was the facility to create Zips within Explorer by selecting a bunch of files and sending them to a ‘compressed folder’. Previously you’d have had to use a third-party utility such as Winzip or PKZip to do this.

The icing on the cake was that you could encrypt the zipfile with a password – anybody could still see the file names inside the zipfile, but they couldn’t open those files without the password. And if you wanted to stop people seeing the file names, then you reiterated the process by creating an outer, password-protected zipfile.

The same facility is available in Windows XP, though the password protection takes a bit of finding. The trick is to select the compressed folder in the left-hand pane of Explorer, and you’ll find that ‘Add a password…’ appears on the File menu. If you’re using Vista, then don’t bother looking for the password feature – it has been removed. Vista will still open existing password-protected Zips, however.

If you’d like the encryption back then try Jzip. This lets you encrypt-as-you-zip as well as encrypting existing zipfiles. It also supports other archive formats such as TAR and RAR, and it’s free.

All thumbs
Reader Peter Inglis had Vista running for three weeks when all his thumbnails of JPEG image files were replaced by generic pictures of a landscape with sea, mountains and sky. In fact, the little landscape is one of several possibilities for various file types.

TIFFs and BMPs display as a picture of artist’s brushes, a palette and some blobs of paint on a canvas, GIFs display as a still-life of a cone, sphere and cube, PNGs as two flowers and Windows Metafiles as a little pot of pencils. XP does a similar thing, though its Explorer doesn’t have the huge icon option so they are less noticeable.

If you look closely you should be able to make out a mountain landscape (TIFF) and a sailing boat in a sunset (JPEG). Your icon experience in both systems may vary depending on the image-editing software you have installed. The cure for this reversion in Vista is to go to Folder Options and turn off ‘Always show icons, never thumbnails’. XP doesn’t have this global option, so this should not be a problem.

Favourite places in XP
We’ve mentioned the Favourite Links feature of Vista – custom shortcuts to folders that you can place in the left-hand pane of Explorer – and several readers enquired if there was any way of doing something similar in XP. There isn’t, but the Vista favourites also appear in the standard Save and Open dialogues. And this you can replicate in XP – up to a point.

The standard entries in the Open/Save places bar include Desktop, Documents, Recent Documents, Network and Computer (with a few ‘My’s thrown in), but these can be changed. In Tweak UI, under Common Dialogues, Places Bar, if you check the ‘Custom’ button in the right-hand pane you’ll find you can type in up to five custom locations.

If, like me, you’re too lazy to do that, then browse to the desired destinations in Explorer, then copy the path from the Address toolbar (see the attached PDF). If you don’t have Tweak UI, then in XP Pro you can also configure this (with administrator status) from the Group Policy Editor.

Burrow down through User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer, Common Open File Dialogue. Double-click on ‘Items displayed in Places Bar’ in the right-hand pane and you’ll be able to specify the five locations as in Tweak UI. XP Home users and real toughies can also do this in the Registry.

Go to HKCU \Software \Microsoft\ Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \comdlg32 \PlacesBar. You can have up to five string values, named Place0 to Place4, whose values are the path to the chosen folder.