When you open My Computer, by default XP will search for network files and printers. This slows down the display of the icons while the search takes place, especially on a slow machine. You can speed this up by telling XP not to perform this search. Here’s how:
Click Start | My Computer.
Click Tools [...]
The insertion point is the blinking vertical line that shows you where to type in an application. You can change the speed of the blinking and the thickness of the line.
Click Start | Control Panel | Accessibility Options.
Click the Display tab.
Under Cursor Options, you’ll see two sliders that can be used to [...]
Office 2000:
Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE).
Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 9.0\ Common\ General. If any of these branches aren’t there, just create them – one by one – by selecting New and then Key from the Edit menu.
Once you’ve highlighted the General key, select New and then DWORD Value [...]
Right-click the menu bar or toolbar, and select Customize.
Right-click the ‘Type a question for help’ box, and turn off the Show Ask a Question box option.
Click Close. You’ll have to do this in each application to get rid of them all.
In your root directory:
Anything with the extensions *.TXT, *.PRV, *.LOG, *.OLD, and *.—.
If you don’t plan on uninstalling Windows, you can delete WIN95UNDO.DAT (Windows 98 only).
In your Windows directory:
Anything with the extensions *.LOG, *.OLD, *.- – -, *.BAK, and *.000, *.001 (and so on…)
Any files with the following dates can [...]
To get rid of a particular Help Contents screen, which are usually useless anyway, just delete the .CNT file from the application directory. For example, to remove the contents page assocated with WINWORD.HLP, for example, just delete WINWORD.CNT from the same folder.
Solution #1:
The next time it appears, click Cancel, and then select the Don’t show the Internet Connection Wizard next time option.
Note that disabling the wizard won’t remove the files from your hard disk (see Solution #2), which means it’s still taking up hard disk space.
Solution #2:
Delete the entire Connection Wizard folder [...]
If youre using a shared PPPoE connection and you cant access a website from any PC except the connection host, it might be a problem with your MTU size. See http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article04-107 for a fix
Windows Me/2000:
Select Settings in your Start Menu, and then select Taskbar & Start Menu.
Turn off the Use Personalized Menus option.
Windows XP:
Select Settings in your Start Menu, and then select Taskbar & Start Menu.
Choose the Start Menu tab, choose Classic Start Menu, and click Customize.
Turn off the Use Personalized Menus option, and click Ok [...]
The problem is that Windows seems to repeatedly recreate the THUMBS.DB file automatically. Here’s how to stop this from happening:
In Explorer, go to Tools -> Folder Options or open the Folder Options icon in the Control Panel.
Choose the View tab, and turn off the Do not cache thumbnails option.
Click Ok.
Once again, Microsoft isn’t following their own rules. The Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is set as the default image viewer for all sorts of file types in Windows XP. Unfortunately, choosing a new program as the default in the File Types window won’t change this, and there’s no option in the Windows interface that [...]
if you’ve already got a utility in place to manage your ZIP files (such as WinZip), this new feature can just get in the way. For example, Windows will search inside ZIP files when using Search – For Files or Folders, a process that not only causes searches to take longer, but one that may [...]
A program can be started automatically at bootup if a shortcut to the program is in your Startup folder (which is inside of your Start Menu folder).
Older programs might still install themselves in your WIN.INI file (on the same line that starts with “LOAD=”). Use Notepad to edit this file.
Some drivers can also [...]
Various stuff about WinXP