Category: Windows XP

The internet is full of eye pleasing beautiful pictures. While surfing the amazing world of internet, if you hit upon a picture you particularly like, such as the following image of the Britney Spears, you can make it your desktop background, so that you can see it whenever you use your computer.

You can add or change the OEM logo you see in System Properties window. You can open System Properties by right-clicking My computer icon and selecting Properties. The OEM logo shown in the System Properties window is a bitmap file (.BMP file) with dimensions 120 pixels x 180 pixels (120 pixels height and 180 pixels width).

Normal way of shutting down Windows (no matter if it is XP, Vista or 7) is clicking on Start Menu button (or orb in Vista and 7) and selecting to shutdown. This way of shutting down may take a considerable time because it waits for all programs to close. You can create a shortcut on your desktop for a faster shutdown.

If get to work with many computers with different passwords, which is true of you work at a computer related company, then you might forget login credentials of one or more computers. Don’t worry, Windows XP allows you to create a password reset disk, using which you can change the password of your account in case you forget it.

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.

Sometimes when a computer running Windows XP encounters a driver or hardware error it immediately restarts. This is a real problem, because you can not find out why the computer restarted. You can disable the automatic restarting of the computer to see the blue screen of death (BSOD) message and copy it down to further diagnose the problem. You can disable the automatic restarting of the computer using the following process.

Windows XP does not show the files with hidden attributes by default. But you can change settings to show these files and folders in Windows using these simple steps.

When Windows starts the first thing you see is the welcome screen, which gives you options to logon into Windows. This is the screen at which you have to select a user and enter username and password. You can disable this welcome screen and choose to have classic logon dialog.

If you want to hide your secret documents in a folder, you can put them in a folder and set its attributes to hidden. This would hide the folder, including all the subfolders and files in it. However this is a very basic method of hiding files.