Change Drive Letters in Windows XP

When you add drives to your computer, such as an extra hard drive, a CD drive, or a storage device that corresponds to a drive,Windows automatically assigns letters to the drives. However, this assignment might not suit your system; for example, you might have mapped a network drive to the same letters that Windows assigns to a new drive. When you want to change drive letters, follow these steps:

· Right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.

· Under Computer Management, click Disk Management. In the right pane, you'll see your drives listed. CD-ROM drives are listed at the bottom of the pane.

· Right-click the drive or device you want to change, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

· Click Change, click Assign the following drive letter, click the drive letter you want to assign, and then click OK

Move taskbars

If you want to change the position of Taskbar then go for it by simply following these steps...

Right click on taskbar (if it is locked than click on lock taskbar to unlock it) drag taskbar to its new location then again locked it by right click on it.

Change Web Page Font Size on the Fly

If your mouse contains a wheel for scrolling, you can change font size on the fly when viewing a Web page. To do so:

Press and hold Ctrl. Scroll down (towards yourself) to enlarge the font size. Scroll up (away from yourself) to reduce the font size.

You might find it useful to reduce font size when printing a Web page, so that you can fit more content on the page.

Double click in single click

If u want to get rid of double clicking to open an item then now you can open an item by just clicking once. For this follow these steps..

start>>my computer>>tools>>folder options>> click single click to open an item then click ok.

Auto Login

Follow these steps for auto login:

· Go to Start/Run, and type 'control userpasswords2'.

· From Users Tab, Uncheck "Users must enter ...."

· A dialog will allow setting a user and password to be used automatically.

Enable Advanced Power Management support

If Win XP Won't Completely Shutdown thn just rty these steps it will work

· Go to Control Panel, then go to Power Options.

· Click on the APM tab, then check the "Enable Advanced Power Management support."

· Shut down your PC.

It should now successfully complete the Shut Down process.

Stop Password Expiration

Do you are tierd of receiveing this message when you log on: "Your password will expire in few days....."?? n wanna to stop expiration of password then now you can do it easily jaust go through this..

Windows XP is set up with passwords which will expire after 42 days.Windows will start warning you of this fact before some days of expiration.

1. Go to Start > Run and type control userpasswords2.

2. Select the Advanced tab in the User Accounts window and Press the Advanced button below the Advanced user management header.

3. Select Users in the Local Users and Groups

4. In the right pane, right-click the user name for which you want to change the setting, and select Properties.

5. On the General tab, check Password never expires

6. Click Apply and OK.

Run a Program as diffrent user without logging out

You can run a program as a different user without logging out and back in again.This trick is particularly useful if you need to have administrative permissions to install a program.

Right click the icon which you want to run, select Run As... and enter the user name and password you want to use. This only applies for that run.

Login automatically in window XP

If your Windows XP installation forces you to login every time you reboot, Sometimes this seems very annoying especially when you are installing a bunch of software or testing out configurations. Now you can automate the login process easily so that you won't have to login again.

For security reasons, you would usually want to have a password, but for a home computer you may not care.

Here are steps to automate the login process in window XP :

1). Go to the Start menu, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.

2). Uncheck this box user must enter a user name and password to use this computer.

3 ). Click the OK button.

Its Done.

A password dialog will open for the currently logged in user. Now when you reboot your system, you will automatically be logged in.

Shutdown XP Faster

Like previous versions of windows, it takes long time to restart or

shutdown windows XP when the "Exit Windows" sound is enabled.

To solve this problem you must disable this useless sound.

· Click Start button.

· Go to settings > Control Panel > Sound, Speech and Audio

devices> Sounds and AudioDevices > Sounds.

· Then under program events and windows menu click on

"Exit Windows" sub-menu and highlight it. Now from sounds

you can select, choose "none" and then click Apply and OK.

Now you should see some improvements when shutting down

your system.

Turn Off Indexing to Speed Up XP

Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk so when you do a search on the hard drive it is faster.There is a downside to this and because the computer has to index all files, it will slow down normal file commands like open, close, etc. If you do not do a whole lot of searches on your hard drive then you may want to turn this feature off:

· Open My Computer.

· Right-click your hard drive icon and select Properties.

· At the bottom of the window you'll see "Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches," uncheck this and click ok.

· A new window will pop up and select Apply to all folders and subfolders. It will take a minute or 2 for the changes to take affect but then you should enjoy slightly faster performance.

Clean Your Prefetch to Improve Performance

This is a unique technique for WinXP. We know that it is necessary to scrub registry and TEMP files for Win9X/ME/2000 periodically. Prefetch is new and very useful

technique in Windows XP. However, after using XP some time, prefetch directory can get full of junk and obsolete links in the Prefetch catalog, which can slow down your computer noticeably.

· Open C(system drive):/windows/prefetch,

. delete those junk and obsolete files,

. reboot.

It is recommended that you do this every month.

Create Shortcut to shutdown computer - Cool Computer Trick

Leaving your computer in a hurry want to shutdown it but reallly it takes a lot of time first go to start menu then click on shutdown then click ok on shutdown dialog box. But now you can shutdown your system in 1 click. Create shortcut os shutdown on your desktop, To create shortcut follow these steps:

1) Go to desktop, Right click on it.

2) Select New >> Shortcut.

3) In new shortcut wizard window type "shutdown -s -t 01" in location.

4) Click Next.

5) Give any name to shortcut, I gave shutdown.

6) Click OK.

Its done.

now you can shutdown your computer by clicking on that shortcut.

Create Shortcut to restart computer - Cool Computer Trick

Create shortcut to restart computer on your desktop, To create shortcut follow these steps:

1) Go to desktop, Right click on it.

2) Select New >> Shortcut.

3) In new shortcut wizard window type "shutdown -r -t 01" in location.

4) Click Next.

5) Give any name to shortcut, I gave shutdown.

6) Click OK.

Its done.

now you can use this shortcut to restart your computer.

Create a Shortcut to Lock Your Computer

Leaving your computer in a hurry but you don’t want to logoff? now You can double-click a shortcut on your desktop to quickly lock the keyboard and display without using CTRL+ ALT+DEL or a screensaver.

To create a shortcut on your desktop to lock your computer:

Right-click the desktop.

Point to New, and then click Shortcut.

The Create Shortcut Wizard opens.

In the text box, type the following:

rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation

Click Next.

Enter a name for the shortcut.

You can call it "Lock Workstation" . choose any name you like.

Click Finish.

You can also change the shortcut's icon

To change the icon:

Right click the shortcut and then select Properties.

Click the Shortcut tab,

click the Change Icon button.

In the Look for icons in this file text box, type:

Shell32.dll.

Click OK.

Select one of the icons from the list and then click OK

You could also give it a shortcut keystroke such CTRL +ALT+L. This would save you only one keystroke from the normal command, but it could be more convenient.

Stop users from writing to usb

If you have windows XP with SP2, then you can disable the writing option to USB drives.

This trick is very useful if you have some viruses in your computer and want to copy files from a USB Drive but u don’t want to transfer virus to the USB. Follow the given steps to disable the USB writing

option:

To edit the computer registry, first you should log onto ur computer with administrative rights.

Click on Start button and type “Regedit” in Run option.

Here locate the location to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Here in right side panel, click right to create a key with the name “StorageDevicePolicies”.

Now in left side panel, select “ StorageDevicePolicies ” key, again right click to create new DWORD value and then label it “ WriteProtect ”. Set its value to “ 1 ″. But again to

enable writing, set its values to “0″.

Now close the registry editor and restart your computer after

any changes to go into effect.

Adjust LargeSystemCache

Normally, the tweak I've seen asks you to go into HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Memory Management and change the value either O or 1 to the adjustment LargeSystemCache.

However, in Windows XP, all you have to do is:

· Right-click My Computer.

· Select Properties.

· Click Advanced.

· Choose Performance.

· Click Advanced again.

· Select either Programs or System Cache.

Programs = 0 for the registry tweak equivalent System Cache = 1 for the registry tweak equivalent

· On NT Server (in this case XP), the Large System Cache option is enabled, but disabled on Workstation The 2 different settings effect how the cache manager allocates free memory. If the Large Cache option is on, manager marks all the free memory, which isn't being used by the system and / or by applications, as freely available for disk caching.

· On the flip-side (with a small cache), the manager instead only sets aside four MB of memory for disk caching in an attempt to accelerate the launch of the

applications.Or in a more technical approach,if enabled the system will favor system-cache working sets over process working sets (with a working set basically being the memory used by components of a process).

Turn Off Autoplay for Program CDs

How can you stop Windows XP from launching program CDs? Its very simple, just follow these steps:

· Click Start, click Run, type GPEDIT.MSC to open Group Policy in the Microsoft Management Console.

· Double-click Computer Configuration, double-click Administrative templates, double-click System, and then click Turn off autoplay.

· The instructions on your screen describe how to configure this setting. Click Properties to display the setting dialog.

· Click Enabled, and choose CD-ROM drives, then click OK, to stop CD autoplay.

This setting does not prevent Autoplay for music CDs.

Scan and Replace window's corrupted System Files

If your computer running slowly or not working properly then there may be some problem in its System files. System files are group of program files that work together to run your computer. These files can be changed or corrupted with time, it may corrupts due to installation of softwares, some internal errors or due to viruses, which makes computer slower.

Scan your system files to check if they are working fine or having some errors. In case of damaged system files you can repair or replace them. It can be done by System file checker.


System File Checker is a utility in Microsoft Windows that allows users to scan for and restore corruptions in Windows system files. This utility is available on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.


Follow these steps to use System file Checker:

1). Go to Run.
2). Type SFC /SCANNOW and click on ok button.
3). It will start scanning proccess and this process takes longer time, it can be more than 30 mins.
4). In case window having some problems, It will display some steps to follow. just follow those steps.

Sticky Menus

Normally when you move the mouse over the Start Menu or over some Programs, it will automatically cascade and show the submenus. But if you want menus to open submenus only when you actually click on them, then those menus are known as sticky menus so here are steps to make sticky menus, you need to make some changes in regestiry just follow these steps:

1. Go to run and type Regedit.
2. In registry editor window, browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Deafault \ Control Panel \ Desktop.
3. Check if there is any string named MenuShowDelay, If it not there, create a string called MenuShowDelay.


4. Give it a value of 65534.
Its done.