Vista: Built-in Drivers

Windows has built-in support for many types of hardware such as USB memory sticks and USB headsets. My install of Vista had trouble with these devices until I started telling it to search the following INF path:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERSTORE\FILEREPOSITORY

I have to tell windows to search this path for every single piece of basic hardware on my machine, but now everything works.

Vista: Sleep Mode

That Vista emphasizes sleep mode over power down is obvious when you look at the start menu:
So it's quite difficult to do anything but enter sleep mode. The problem is that sleep mode won't work if you share music with Windows Media player. This is not an obvious "feature". The only way I've seen to turn it off is the following in Power Options: