Category: Windows XP

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.

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.

The indexing service is set to run automatically by default. It iterates through all the folders and makes an database of contents and properties of files continuously for using in the Windows search later. You may notice heavy hard disk activity and CPU might get heavy load because of this. This article tells you how you can disable it.

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.

In windows explorer, when you choose to view a folder in the Thumbnail or Filmstrip mode, it creates a file Thumbs.db in that folder. This file stores all the thumbnails generated in the folder, so that next time when you open the same folder, Windows do not have to generate thumbnails all over again. This saves CPU power and as Windows do no have generate thumbnails again, opening the same folder would be faster the next time.

If you want to open a command prompt it always opens with path as current user’s documents folder. You can add a right-click shortcut to open the command prompt in any folder you want.