With Vista, you don’t have to know which icons lead to the dialog box you need. Instead you can use the search box at the top right of the Control Panel window to type in a keyword to find what you need. You can use your own keyword—there are no official keywords that need to be used. For instance, you could simply type in ‘defrag’ or ‘backup’ and the appropriate user interface will be be shown. 

No matter what level you are viewing in the Control Panel, you can click on the history bar to take you back to the start or to the sub-menu. This feature allows you to switch quickly from any level in the Control Panel to a particular applet. 

If you take a look at Classic View you will find five entries that weren’t in Windows XP Classic View: 

Autoplay—Adjust the default action you want Vista to take when it detects a USB drive, flash card, DVD, CD etc. Instead of choosing an action from a pop-up box each time they are detected, you can tell Vista how you want it to react by default. 

Date and Time—If you’re traveling, it can be handy to add and extra clock or two set to different time zones. You can then view them by hovering your mouse over the time in the system tray. 

Offline Files—In this applet you can have Vista store a copy of files you access on the network on your PC in case the network connection fails. If this is properly synchronized you would continue to work as though the network was still connected. 

Problems and Solutions—It’s quite ironic that even though Windows Vista uses pop-ups to ask you for permission for many things, it doesn’t actually ask you for permission to send error reports to Microsoft. In this applet you can change that setting so that you do get asked for permission and you can also view records of reports of problems with your system. 

Windows CardSpace—create a profile with your name, email address and other details to use to register on websites instead of filling in online forms.