Thanks to the efforts of my lovely wife, I now have a Run button back in my Start menu. I was correct in guessing that it was a simple checkbox somewhere, and my wife found a guide on-line that explained exactly where it was.

So I never did get around to finding that particular, useful, feature of Vista. But I have stumbled across some rather useless features.

Since I’m running the Ultimate version of Vista at home I get access to a few extra perks that don’t come with the other versions. One of the more questionable features is called Dream Scene which allows you to set a movie as your desktop wallpaper. It certainly looks pretty if you’re just staring at your desktop or chatting on IM… But if you’re doing much more than that you’ll quickly cover the bulk of your desktop in windows – largely hiding that movie. I didn’t run any benchmarks but I have to assume that playing moving video takes up more resources than displaying a static picture. And if you can’t see that movie most of the time, why would you really want to throw away those resources?

Posted on March 15 at 4:45 PM