The Lockergnome weblog details how to speed up your Vista start menu search by selectively enabling how deep your search goes.

For example, the author notes that if you’re only really interested in using the start menu search to launch applications, disabling the file search will tremendously speed things up. Aside from that, since the “Search communications” option currently only searches email and contacts kept in Windows Mail and Contacts, it can be disabled - and if you don’t use IE, “Search favorites and history” needn’t be enabled, either. Point is, if you want to stick to launching apps with the start menu search and searching your desktop with a different desktop search app (say, Google Desktop), this should help you speed up the start menu search for launching.

Beyond that, the Customize Start Menu dialog is worth a look for anyone who’s recently installed Vista (right-click the start button, select Properties, then click Customize…). It operates pretty much the same way as XP’s customize start menu, but it’s worth looking at to make sure the items you want show up and you get rid of the items you don’t want. — Adam Pash

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If you’ve got to perform an action on a bunch of files at the command line, you want to master the for statement. The Daily Cup of Tech web site explains how the command:

for /R %z in (*.zip) do unzip "%z"

Iterates through all the zip archives in a folder and extracts them. If you’re starting to get your feet wet automating tasks with batch scripts, this is a nice for primer. —Gina Trapani

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

The Apple TV may go down in history as the most rapidly hacked Apple product ever; the news comes in so fast if we wanted to covered it all, we’d have to spin off Engadget Apple TV. That said, since upgrading the ATV’s drive we’ve been tracking these hacks, and the first really big milestone since has been achieved: use of the disabled USB port. Apple claims the USB is there as a service port, and to make sure no one gets any funny ideas they disabled it in software. Thats where the crew at AwkwardTV come in. After six days on the case, they finagled a way to enable the port, and with it keyboards, mice, external hard drives, and who knows what else. Before you run out and expect to externally expand the storage on your Apple TV, you need to realize that the newfound space will only be available to the applications you added, and not (yet) for media playback. This is certainly an admirable accomplishment, but we wonder, what’s the point? If you really wanted to run OS X applications with a keyboard and mouse in your home theater, wouldn’t it be more sensible to buy a Mac mini? At least with that you get lots of other goodies, including the ability to make it a proper DVR. Regardless, for those who want a $300 Mac-like product that is small and quiet, this might be the best news you heard all day.

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