3 nifty Vista features

Aubrie decided this week that we should go get some library cards. We got them yesterday and I must admit that I've got a lot of reading ahead of me. Along with some other books, I got a book called "Windows Vista: Beyond the Manual." At first, I thought it would be a pretty in depth book about the internals of Vista, but for the most part, I was wrong. Let's just say there were approximately 454 pages out of 459 that I just didn't care about. I knew most of the stuff already (I did a LOT of skimming and skipping), but there were three things that I thought were kind of cool.

• Have you ever tried selecting 10+ files from a folder that are all over the place? You have to hold CTRL while selecting each file and if you accidently let go of that button you have to start all over. Apparently, Vista has an option in the "Folder Options" box called "Use Check Boxes to Select Items." This lets you simply select check boxes instead of holding CTRL and screwing it up. Not earth shattering by any means, but somewhat useful.
• Second, one short coming of Windows in general has been the lack of symbolic links. Well, I guess Microsoft finally wised up and added the functionality. It can only be done from the command line for now, but I guess it has to start somewhere. Using the "mklink" command, links can be made to folders and directories.
• Lastly, I'd never heard of this before, but it seems Vista has an automatic error recovery program that can be run on boot-up if the system is in an unbootable state. It's called WinRE. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks like it could be fairly useful for those that aren't too knowledgeable about computers.

I hope this benefits somebody, because I hope I never have to read/skim/skip through that many pages of text just to find three useful things, but I guess learning isn't always easy.