Category: Windows XP

If you are an administrator and want to control access of various users to a file or folder then there is no better way other than doing it through the command line. In Windows XP, you can control access of users through the command line cacls.

When you delete files and folders in Windows, they are moved to the Recycle Bin. There you can choose to restore them or delete them permanently. But you can bypass the Recycle Bin and delete files permanently using this setting in Recycle Bin.

System files in Windows XP may get corrupted because of many reasons like a virus attack, improper Windows shutdown etc. Windows XP has a System File Checker tool (known as SFC in short) which can check all the protected system files against the original versions stored on the Windows XP CD and replace them if it finds them altered or corrupted.

After installation of Windows XP, you need to activate it with Microsoft over the internet or the telephone. But you do not have to do so every time, you re-install Windows XP. You can backup Windows activation after you have activated Windows, and later use the backup to re-activate Windows after re-installation of Windows XP.

Sometimes when you try to delete a folder, you get an error : Access Denied. This may be because you do not have proper permissions on that folder or file. But you easily take ownership of a file or folder.

Windows XP and Vista provide a command line tools taskkill and tasklist to list and kill any running process. Using this, you can kill a process using image path or pid etc. This article shows you how you can use this tool.

There are times when a program freezes and hangs up. It wont respond to any mouse clicks or keyboard. Then you can terminate that program using Windows Task Manager.

The Windows Disk Defragmenter does not defragment the system files which are being used by Windows. For example, the virtual memory file or the page file. Mark Russinovich of System Internals has made a free utility for defragmenting these files.

If you get an old computer with many user accounts you might wanna delete all user accounts except the one you want to use. Similarly, when you do not need a user account anymore, you want to delete it. To delete a user account in Windows XP you must be logged in as administrator.

When you create or copy new files on your hard disk, Windows creates these files one after another on the hard disk wherever the space is available. Sometimes, a file has to be written in fragments in many places as the space is available on the hard disk. Fragmenting can make the Windows slow to respond.