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Most people know how to use Recovery Console after booting from a Windows XP CD. But few people know that you can install Recovery Console on your hard disk. When you do so, the option for booting into Recovery Console will appear when Windows XP starts.

After Windows XP boots up to the Welcome Screen or the Logon Screen for a user to log on to the Windows desktop, there may be a message on the Logon Welcome page that the user has certain number of unread mail messages, together with the email address of the account. You can disable it if you want to.

Windows XP has a built in encryption feature so that you can encrypt any file or folder. This feature is only available if your hard disk is NTFS formatted. If you have installed XP on a FAT32 formatted hard disk then you will not be able to use this feature.

If your computer hardware supports hibernation feature of Windows XP (most modern computers support hibernation), then you can enable or disable hibernation support in Windows XP.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.