Exposé in Mac OS X is a fantastic feature—one could argue a necessary feature to make up for the lack of a task bar. I use it all the time, although I have no idea which function keys invoke it. If you haven't done so already, tie the "All Windows" switch of Exposé to the bottom-right corner of the screen (or to the bottom-left corner if you're left-handed). With this, invoking Exposé becomes a gesture—a quick flick of the wrist and you are presented with all of your visible windows.

Until OS 10.5 however there has been one major drawback in the use of Exposé. When you had a number of windows open of similar appearance (text documents for example) in order to select the one you wanted you were forced to mouse-over each window in turn to see its name. Now in 10.5 you can hold down the Option key and the name of each window will appear. Thank goodness! I had been hoping for this for quite some time. (Now the dock needs a similar feature for those who minimise a number of documents of the same kind.) Thanks to Rob Griffiths for this tip.

Now if Apple could only fix the when-all-open-windows-are-at-full-size bug in Exposé I'd be a very happy Mac user. (If you haven't seen this crazy behaviour before: open up TextEdit, hide all other applications, press command-N a number of times, click the green button in each window, and then invoke Exposé and see how efficiently the screen space is used.)

I had problems again this week with the Windows Update control panel in Vista. Try as I may it would keep failing, reciting the error number 8024400D. The fix, whilst simple, is somewhat odd and is one that I don't understand. You simply have to visit the "old" Windows Update website in Internet Explorer, which then kicks you back to a working Windows Update control panel.

What the heck does the website do to my computer that the control panel can't do? People more paranoid than myself may be worried by such a thought. And why would a functioning Windows Update spontaneously decide that it didn't want to work anymore? Ah... the mystery that is Windows continues with Windows Vista.

Update! After further investigation I think this problem is caused by deleting a particular cookie. By revisiting the Windows Update website, the cookie is resent.

If you somehow managed to switch off hibernation in Vista, probably by deleting the hiberfil.sys file using Disk Cleanup, here's how to switch it back on.

Of course you can switch hibernation back off again by changing on to off in the above command.

Yesterday my icons in Vista became all messed up. In versions of Windows previous to Vista, I'm used to using the "repair" feature in Tweak UI to repair icons. Microsoft has not released a version of PowerToys for Vista, not yet anyway, of which Tweak UI would be a part of. Well there is really easy fix that does not require any extra software.

Right-click the desktop and select...

Once there switch to "Windows Classic" and then back to "Windows Aero".