Windows xp august 2007

Microsoft KnowledgeBase article explains how you can make multiple paging files on a single volume or partition. This makes the information on this page useful, since ReadyBoost has a maximum of 4 GB at the moment. Windows XP will refuse to run swap off a disk it knows to be removable. It will create the page file or not but it will never, ever page anything to it. This policy is enforced at a very deep level.

Freeware WinXP. Free Download. Description Info All versions Reviews. AutoPatcher could be described as an offline Windows Update. AutoPatcher provides an interface to a large collection of updates, common applications and registry tweaks, that can be easily and quickly applied to your computer system.

If you have many computers or if you format your computer frequently, it saves both time and bandwidth. With AutoPatcher, you can install critical patches offline, eliminating the risk of getting infected while using Windows Update. Run the download, close Internet Explorer, then start it up again. Choose Toolbar Wallpaper from the Tools menu and pick your wallpaper!

Download a corrected version. As a workaround press F5 or select: Refresh, the page will produce the Image List. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta - many of the above features has now been incorporated into this new Toolbar. In my testing this Toolbar works great, although it is mostly intended for website developers.

This was fine several years ago but since then the hard drive capacities have increased dramatically. When Outlook Express is closed it fails to cleanup these files. To delete these zero-byte files you must select the above option "Delete all offline files". Lately there has been a rash of incidents where either a web site or email spam has contained a hidden javascript that changes your Home Page entry, then disables the users ability to change it back. To prevent this from happening Set your Home Page then disable the ability to change it via a Registry restriction.

It is also recommended you use a Startup Monitor. Be aware that in some cases this method does not work as some of these parasites will re-write the registry entries on each restart. However a "Startup Manager" will prompt you if your setting are being changed.

The HKLM takes precedence and applies to all users. If your HomePage gets hijacked, you may need to "undo" both locations. If the HomePage restriction has been applied by an Administrator, "Limited Users" can not make this change. Start Run type gpedit. Ever notice sometimes you right-click on a link and open a new window and it's not full screen? This usually occurs because IE remembers the last window size when closed.

Many times a background pop-up will do this too, if it is the last window closed. To resize the window and regain control: Close all instances of Internet Explorer except for one. Right-click on a link in the page and select: "Open in New Window" Close the first browser window using the [ X ] upper right corner Resize the window manually by dragging the sides to the desired size.

Hold down the Ctrl key and click the Close button upper right [Exception] In some cases the "Remember last window size" info becomes corrupted in the Registry. You can download a small reg file to reset to default and correct this behavior. Download: ResetWindowPlacement. Posted by Vipin at AM 17 comments. The above registry file will correct this behavior, if your status bar disappears when opening a new IE browser window.

However make sure that option is selected - right-click the top Toolbar and select: Status Bar. Labels: i , Internet Explorer. Did you ever get your Toolbars in IE set just right only to reboot and you lose your settings? Many times when Toolbars are added or removed the Registry entry that controls these settings does not get updated or has become corrupt. You can download a small registry file to reset to default and correct this behavior.

Download: ResetBrowserToolbar. Then right-click the Toolbar and select: "Lock the Toolbars". You can also drag this shortcut into your Quick Launch area.

Posted by Vipin at AM 23 comments. Here's how to use itand how to convert your existing disk to NTFS if it doesn't already use it. If you need more hard-disk space, don't buy another hard disk right away. NTFS's on-the-fly compression capabilities can shrink the size of individual files and folders, or entire drives.

When you use it, the files or folders will be compressed when they're on your hard disk to save space, but they will be decompressed automatically when you use them, and then compressed again when stored on your hard disk. You can also easily turn compression on and off. If you're not sure which filesystem your volume uses, right-click your volume in Explorer, choose Properties General, and look for the information next to File System.

How much disk space can you save by using NTFS compression? That depends largely on the kinds of files you have on your system. Bit-mapped graphics files are very compressible, so you'll save quite a bit of hard-disk space if you have many of them. Document files, such as Word files, are also reasonably compressible, while certain kinds of files, such as PDF Adobe Acrobat files, are barely compressible at all. If you use NTFS compression on a file, the file can't be encrypted using XP's encrypting capabilities, so be careful not to compress any files that you want to encrypt.

In tests on my own PC, I found that bit-mapped. Word files shrunk by 66 percenta folder full of them shrunk from KB to 44KB. PDF files, by way of contrast, hardly compressed at all: a group of them shrunk by just more than 6 percent, from 5. When you use compression, you might notice a slight drop in system performance. There might be a slight lag when opening or closing files, depending on the speed of your system, because the files have to be decompressed for you to open them and compressed when you save them.

With newer systems, though, you probably won't notice a lag. On my now-aging 1. You can use NTFS compression on individual files, folders, and entire disks. You'll see the screen shown in Figure Figure Enabling compression on files and folders to save hard-disk space Check the box next to "Compress contents to save disk space," click OK, and click OK again when the Properties dialog box appears.

If you want to compress an entire drive, right-click it in Windows Explorer and choose Properties General "Compress drive to save disk space. Depending on the size of the drive, the procedure can take several hours.

You can continue to use XP while the compression takes place. During that time, however, you might be prompted to close a file you're working on so that XP can compress it.

By default, XP visually differentiates between compressed files and decompressed files; compressed files are shown in blue. If for some reason your compressed files aren't blue, and you want them to be, from Windows Explorer choose Tools Folder Options View, scroll down, and select the checkbox next to "Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color.

If you do, your system can take a severe performance hit because these files are in frequent background use and compressing and decompressing them constantly takes up CPU power. If these files are in folders that are compressed, you can decompress just those individual files by unchecking the "Compress contents to save disk space" box next to them. You can also decompress the folder in which they are located in the same way.

You can use Windows Explorer to change how XP handles file types; for example, you can choose the default action when the file type is double-clicked, choose the application associated with the file type, choose the icon for the file type, and choose whether the extension should be displayed or hidden in Windows Explorer.

To perform most of these actions, choose Tools Folder Options File Types, choose the file type for which you want to customize an action, and then click Advanced. Editing file associations and their actions From the Edit File Type dialog box, you can change the icon, edit the action to be taken on the file, and choose whether to display the file type in Windows Explorer. The dialog box is fairly self-explanatory. For example, click Change Icon to change the icon; to edit any action, highlight it and click Edit.

If you want to change the application associated with the file, choose Tools Folder Options File Types, choose the file type whose association you want to change, click Change, and then choose the application you want to be associated with the file type in the same way as shown in Figure When you right-click a file in Explorer, you get a shortcut menu that includes a list of programs with which you can open the file.

But the programs you want to open those files might not always be on the shortcut menu. It's easy to add new programs to that list. Let's say you want to add a shortcut menu item that allows. In the Registered File Types list, select the file type for which you want to add a new shortcut menu item. In our example, we'll choose a GIF file. After this hack, any time you click a file of this type, you'll get a new choice to open the file with. Once you've chosen your file type, choose Advanced New.

You'll see the New Action dialog box shown in Figure Adding a new program to the shortcut menu In the New Action box, type the text you want to appear on the shortcut menufor example, Open with IrfanView. In the "Application used to perform action" box, enter the executable program you want to open the file with, including the full path. Surround it by quotation marks.

The change will take place immediately, and the new command will appear on the shortcut menu for the specified file type. Internet Explorer's titlebar displays the text "Microsoft Internet Explorer," along with the title of the page you're currently visiting. However, you can change the "Microsoft Internet Explorer" text to any text you want. Exit the Registry and close Internet Explorer if it's open.

The next time you open Internet Explorer, the titlebar will have your new text. If you want your titlebar to have no text in it, aside from the title of the page you're currently visiting, create the Window Title string value but leave the Value field empty. Posted by Vipin at PM 0 comments. Posted by Vipin at PM 1 comments. Internet Explorer has both a static and an animated logo. The static logo displays when the browser is inactive, and the animated logo displays when the browser is locating a site, connecting, and actively downloading pages or images from the Web.

Before you begin, you'll need to create new logos to replace the existing ones. You'll have to create two sets of icons in. Each set will have a static logo and an animated logo. The static logos should be 22 22 pixels for the smaller size and 38 38 pixels for the larger size. The animated logos have to be animated bitmaps, each of which should have a total of 10 frames. So, the smaller animated bitmap should be 22 pixels wide by pixels high, and the larger animated bitmap should be 38 pixels wide by pixels high.

Create the static bitmaps with any graphics program, including the version of Paint that comes with XP. Make sure when using Microangelo to choose Tools New Image format, which will let you create the icons with the proper pixel dimensions, as explained in the previous paragraph.

To create the animated bitmaps, you'll need special tools. Microangelo does a great job of creating them, and that's your best bet. As you might guess, the SmallBitmap value points to the smaller logo, and the BigBitmap value points to the larger logo. Once again, as you might guess, SmBrandBitmap is for the smaller animated logo and BrandBitmap is for the larger logo. Exit the Registry and close Internet Explorer. When you next start up Internet Explorer, it should display your new logos.

To revert to the default logos, simply delete the values you've created. Command-line junkies always want the command prompt within easy reach. Here's how to put a command prompt directly on your desktop, so it's there whenever you need it. If you use the command line regularlyfor example, to launch Windows Explorer with shortcuts you'd like the command line within easy reach. In fact, you'd like it right on your desktop. XP has no built-in way to do that for you. Putting the command line right on your desktop with MCL Use it as you would use the normal command line, including any normal switches that you use to launch programs.

But MCL does more than just let you enter commands. It includes a number of other goodies that the XP command prompt doesn't, including these: It keeps a history of your last commands, so you can easily reenter or edit any commands you've already typed.

It includes an AutoComplete function that finishes your commands for you. It lets you launch URLs directly from the command line. It can be minimized to the System Notification area.

It can be launched with a hotkey. The default is Ctrl-Alt-M. The program has a few eccentricities you'll have to keep in mind when using it. Run it instead of the normal command prompt and get countless new features, such as a command-line editor for modifying and re-executing previous commands; the ability to copy, delete, and rename groups of files and directories with a single command; a built-in file viewer; the ability to select or include files by a variety of criteria, including date, time, and size; the ability to append descriptions up to characters to files; and an exceedingly powerful batch language.

It combines the command line with Windows Explorer navigation, so not only can you use the command line, but also you can navigate through your PC using Explorer. Cygwin is a free command shell plus a set of applications that make your Windows XP installation perform more like a Linux environment. Cygwin installs differently than most applications.

You download a small application that manages the rest of the installation process. You must have an active Internet connection when you run the installer so that it can find the correct packages on Cygwin mirror servers located all over the globe.

Got a hard disk filled with many files, and no easy way to find what you want quickly? Use the Indexing Service and its query language to get what you wantfast. Packrats like me and my editor have a hard time finding exactly what they want on their hard disks.

I have thousands of files there, some dating back close to 10 years, which I dutifully copy to a new system every time I upgrade my hardware. After all, who knows when I might need to find the list of books I planned to take out of the library in ?

XP's Search Companion is too slow and the kinds of searches it can perform are fairly limited. It can't find files based on properties such as when the file was last printed or the word count of a file, or using a sophisticated search language. It can perform searches hundreds of times faster and includes an exceedingly sophisticated query language you can use for performing searches. It works by indexing the files on your disk, and then, when you do a search, it queries that index rather than searching through your entire hard disk.

The indexes the service creates are called catalogs. By default, the Indexing Service is turned off. When you activate the Indexing Service, it won't be available immediately. First it has to build an index, which can take a substantial amount of time, depending on the number of files on your hard disk and your processor speed. It's best to start the Indexing Service and leave your computer on overnight so that it can complete indexing.

When you do that, you'll use the normal Search Companion. The index will remain intact; when you do a search, you just won't search through it. You can always turn the index back on when you want. Using the Indexing Service's Query Language The Indexing Service's query language is a sophisticated language, letting you search on file propertiessuch as the author of documents or the number of bytes in a documentusing Boolean operators and other search criteria.

The language uses tags to define search criteria. A freetext expression search looks for any words in the phrase and returns files that have any one of the words in the phrase. It works like the Boolean OR operator. Searching Using Properties The Indexing Service's query language's power is contained in the way it can search not just for text, but also for document properties.

To see summary information for any document, right-click the document and choose Properties Summary. In addition to searching for properties in the summary, you can also search for the properties found in Table , which lists the most important properties you can use to search.

Table Important properties for searching via the Indexing Service Property Description Access The last time the document was accessed. All All available properties. Works with text queries, but not numeric queries. Network Diagnostic Tool KB v User Profile Hive Cleanup 1. Windows Defender v1. Windows Desktop Search 3. Windows Installer 3. Windows Live Messenger v8.

Windows Media Player 11 newer build since AutoPatcher feb07 releases. Windows Messenger 5. Windows PowerShell 1. Windows Script 5. Windows Update v7. Windows Genuine Advantage. Copy Profile Tool. Delete Microsoft Java VM tool. DirectX Control Panel applet. PowerMenu 1. Remove Windows Messenger tool.

Macromedia Adobe Flash Player 9. Macromedia Adobe Shockwave Player v Startup Control Panel 2. Startup Monitor. Windows Uptime Tool. And of course a lot of registry tweaks which improve speed, appearance, functionality and security! BitTorrent is a P2P system that makes transfering large files or groups of files amongst a large group of people easy, fast and efficient.

The BitTorrent network is impressive mostly for the speed and reliability with which you get files that have been recently released. As long as a. Always remember to leave your BitTorrent client open to help distribute the files!