I don't have any specific links, but here are three
basics that I've collected:

------- Turn off UAC -------

1. Click Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click User Accounts and Family Safety
4. Click User Accounts
5. Click Turn User Account Control On or Off
6. Uncheck the checkbox
7. Click OK

------ Fix the admin account so that it really is admin -----

1) Open the command prompt with Administrative privileges by opening the
Start Menu, typing cmd in the search box. Then press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to
open cmd with admin rights.

2) Type the following in the command prompt and then press Enter:

net user administrator /active:yes

You must type it in just as it appears above.

3) Restart the computer and then log in as Administrator.

---------- Turn off security center nags ----------

1/ Click the Start Button

2/ From the Start Menu click Control Panel

3/ In Control panel click the Security Center Icon

4/ On the Left hand side of the Security Center window you will see a list
of option

5/ Click on the Change the way Security Center alerts me option

6/ Another box will now appear marked 'Do you want to be notified of
Security issues?'

7/ Look down the list of options and click on Don't notify me and don't
display the icon (not recommended) option

8/ The box will now close and Security center will no longer notify you of
any Security issues

9/ To re-enable notification click on the 'Yes notify me and display the
icon (recommended) option

----------------------

There are probably some other basic things to
fix. If it were me I'd also uninstall PCHealth /
System File Protection, though I'm not sure whether
that can be done in Vista. (In WinME/XP there's an
uninstall string in the Registry, under the
HKLM\....\Uninstall\PCHealth key which can be
run from the Run window to uninstall the whole thing
and stop the endless, periodic disk thrashing caused
by SFP scanning for deleted or changed files.
(Note that you lose Windows Help functionality in
the process on both ME and XP.)

Along the same lines I would turn off indexing, which,
as far as I can see is another useless function to kill
off hard disks before their time. (I don't remember ever
waiting a problematic length of time for Windows to
find specific text in any file on a given disk partition, and
I don't have any indexing running.)




> I'm an experienced user about to get my first machine configured with
Vista
> Home Premium.
>
> I'll have a lot of work to do uninstalling and installing software to set
up
> my new machine. Learning to cope with the security features that I've
heard
> gets in the way so much seems to be the first thing I would want to learn
to
> do eh?
>
> Does anybody have any referrals to blogs about setting up Vista in this
> context to make it more user friendly? Is there a known blog or guide yuo
> can refer me to?
>
>