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Tweaks that don't require registry edits.

By: lowster11
 

There are many Windows utilities available that enable you to make system changes via a dialog box that would normally require a registry edit. One of the best is a Microsoft-provided, free utility TweakUI. (UI stands for User Interface.) It offers extra settings for a variety of categories of hardware and applications. Visit the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Web site to download it. Make sure you get the regular one, not the one for Itanium systems. After you download and install it, run it from the Start menu (All Programs > Power Toys for Windows > TweakUI).

Inside the TweakUI window, the left pane is a folder tree similar to the one in Microsoft Windows Explorer. Click a plus sign to expand a category, and then click an item within a category to see the available options for it. This course references TweakUI options throughout as alternatives to registry edits.

Take some time to examine TweakUI now, and then return to this lesson when you're ready to continue.
Learn more
There are other programs that do basically the same thing (some with different sets of tweaks), but most of them are not free after the limited trial period. To discover some of them, go to Download.com and search for tweak.

Bypassing the logon screen at start up

Whenever you have more than one user set up in the Users applet of the Control Panel, Windows XP prompts you for a user every time it starts up. (It also does this if you have a single user account that has a password assigned.) Many people find this annoying, and would like for a default user to be logged in automatically. To bypass automatic logon, hold down Shift as the PC boots, or let it logon as the default user, and then switch users with the Start > Log Off command.

One way to set a default user is with TweakUI. In the Logon category, select Autologon, and then enter the user that should be logged in automatically. If that user has a password, click the Password button to enter it.

Here's another way to do it that doesn't require TweakUI:

Select Start > Run. Type control userpasswords2, and then click OK. The User Accounts dialog box, appears.

Uncheck the Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer. checkbox, and then click OK.
When prompted, enter the user name and password that should be used to log in by default, and then click OK.
Changing the administrator password
When you first install Windows, you're prompted for an Administrator password. This is the password for a special account with the user name of Administrator, and is different from a regular user account that might have administrator-level privileges assigned to it.

Usually, you do not need to use the Administrator account, so it's easy to forget its password. However, there are some special situations where you must log in as Administrator, such as if you want to access the Recovery Console. So you should know the password to prepare for such future situations.

To access the Recovery Console, boot from the Windows XP CD and then select to repair the existing installation.

To reset the Administrator password, open the User Accounts dialog box by following Step 1 in the preceding section, and then clicking the Reset Password button. If the Reset Password button is grayed out, check the checkbox at the top of the window to make it available.


Disabling error reporting

How many times have you received one of those error-reporting prompts when a program crashed? Microsoft wants you to report your errors so they can build a better patch, and if you're feeling altruistic, that's fine, but a lot of people find the error reporting prompt annoying.

You can turn error reporting off from within the System Properties. To do so, follow these steps:

Open the System Properties from the Control Panel (right-click My Computer and then select Properties).
On the Advanced tab, click Error Reporting.
Select Disable error reporting, and then click OK.

Disabling error reporting.
Disabling debug prompting in Microsoft Internet Explorer
While we're on the subject of error reporting, you've probably also experienced a scripting error on a Web page with a debug prompt, right? Unless you happened to be the author of the Web page, there's usually not much point in playing around with debugging it, so why not turn that prompt off entirely?

From within Internet Explorer, select Tools > Internet Options.
On the Advanced tab, check the Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer) checkbox and then Disable Script Debugging (Other) checkboxes, Click OK.
If you have an earlier version of Internet Explorer (perhaps because you have not installed SP2), there's only one checkbox that covers all debugging types.

Disabling hibernation

Hibernation enables you to copy the contents of RAM (random access memory) to the hard disk and then shut down the PC to save its battery. If you're on a desktop PC, this is not of much use; simply use the Standby feature, which is not only quicker to resume, but also not as buggy and does not take up hard disk space.

If you've decided not to use hibernation, you might want to disable hibernation in Windows. Doing so frees up an amount of hard disk space equivalent to the amount of RAM you have. For example, if you have 1 GB of RAM, it will free 1 GB of hard disk space. To do so, from the Control Panel, double-click Power Options, click the Hibernate tab, and then uncheck the Enable hibernation checkbox.

Disabling drive indexing
Windows maintains an index of each drive's contents, and this index speeds up any searches you perform. If you don't search very often, though, you might prefer to turn indexing off. Turning indexing off saves system resources by eliminating a memory-hogging background activity, making your PC faster in opening, closing, and saving files.

To disable drive indexing for a drive, open My Computer, right-click the hard drive, and then select Properties. Uncheck the Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for faster searches checkbox, and then click OK.

Disabling memory dumps
When a STOP error occurs (a blue-screen-of-death error that starts with the word STOP), Windows does a full dump of what's in RAM to a file for debugging. For most of us, this is useless, and a minute or two of our lives that we'll never get back. To eliminate this delay in the event of a STOP error, do the following:

From the Control Panel, double-click System to open its Properties dialog box.
On the Advanced, tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
Change the Write debugging information setting to (none), and then click OK twice.

Optimizing virtual memory

Virtual memory, also known as the paging file, prevents Windows from running out of RAM as it operates. When the system starts running low on physical RAM for accomplishing all its tasks, it starts swapping data out of physical RAM to a reserved area of the hard disk called a paging file or swap file. This swapping frees up part of the physical RAM for more data. Then when the data in the paging file is needed again in RAM, Windows swaps out some other data and brings the original data back in again.

Windows is configured to automatically manage the paging file, and it does a pretty good job on its own. By default, the paging file is located on the main hard disk, and its maximum size is set to 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM in the PC. Most people leave it alone, so feel free to read this section as an FYI only and not make any changes to your system.

Relocating the paging file
If you have two physical hard disks (not a single physical hard disk partitioned into two logical drives), you might want to relocate the paging file to the disk that does not contain Windows XP. You might want to do this because the paging file is often a performance bottleneck in many systems because hard disks are so much slower than physical RAM. So anything you can do to speed up access to the paging file will likely help performance. One of the reasons the paging file access is so slow is that it has to compete with all the other data traffic on the hard disk's I/O (input/output) bus. If you put the paging file on a separate physical hard disk -- and ideally, on a separate IDE (Integrated Device Electronics) cable altogether -- you get a small bump in paging file access time, and a small bump in overall Windows XP speed.

Another technique for possibly speeding up paging file access is to split the paging file across several physical hard disks (provided none of them gets heavy use from the operating system or from applications). Many experts say that the more physical hard disks you can spread it across, the better the speed will be, because of the ability to simultaneously read/write multiple drives.

Don't put a paging file on a fault-tolerant RAID (redundant array of independent disks) if you can help it.

To change the drive on which the paging file resides, do the following:

From the Control Panel, double-click System to open its Properties dialog box.
On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Performance.
In the Performance Options dialog box, click the Advanced tab.
Click Change under Virtual memory.
Click the drive that currently contains the paging file, and then click No paging file.
Select the drive on which you want to place the paging file, and then select System managed size.

Click OK. When prompted, allow a restart.
If you want to split up the paging file, click one of the drives and click Custom size, and then enter initial and m0061ximum sizes for it. For the initial size, use 1.5X the amount of RAM in your system divided by the number of drives on which you will be splitting it. For the maximum size, use 3X the amount of RAM divided by the number of drives. Repeat this for each drive on which you want to place part of it.
The performance of a desktop
Sure, notebook PCs provide freedom and mobility, but usually at the expense of the performance and capability of a desktop. Not so with HP notebooks, which have the kind of efficient performance you're used to from a desktop.



Sizing and defragmenting the paging file

The default paging file size is usually fine. The more RAM you have (512 MB and higher), the more likely your system will perform just fine with a smaller paging file, down to as little (for the initial size) as the same size as your RAM pool. But unless you're running short on hard disk space, play it safe and keep it at the default size.

The maximum size is less of an issue because Windows claims only the amount of space on the hard disk for the paging file that it needs. Setting a large maximum size does no harm, so leave it set to about 3X the amount of RAM.

Defragmenting the paging file
Just like other files, over time the paging file gets fragmented and does not perform as well as it did when it was new and contiguous. Unfortunately, the Disk Defragmenter in Windows does not defragment the paging file. (This is because it considers the paging file to be "in use" as Windows is operating and it can't defragment a file that's in use.)

To get around this, there are two options. One is simply to delete and re-create the paging file. To do this, do one of the following:

If you have two hard disks, relocate the paging file to the other one temporarily, reboot, and then move it back again to its original location.
If you have only one hard disk, turn off the paging file (select No paging file), reboot, and then turn it back on again by selecting System managed size.
The other option is to use a third-party utility that will defragment the paging file upon Windows startup. One such program is Diskeeper 9, a full-featured defragmentation utility.

To monitor paging file usage on an ongoing basis, read the Page File Performance Monitoring article at TheElderGeek.com, which is a great source for Windows information.


Improving display performance

All the little flourishes in the Windows display take their toll on performance, especially on a slower PC. If you notice some lagging in the video performance, such as being able to see a screen "paint" from top to bottom or a delay in a window appearing fully, consider turning off some of the display effects.

To do this, view the Display Properties dialog box (right-click the desktop and select Properties) and on the Appearance tab, click Effects. The Effects dialog box. Turn off the transition effect here, and then uncheck the Show shadows under menus checkbox.

Click OK to close all open dialog boxes, and then open the System Properties dialog box from the Control Panel. On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Performance, and then select the Adjust for best performance, Click OK to apply the changes.

You might also get a little bit better performance out of your monitor and video card by turning down the color depth and display resolution, especially on an older system. For each pixel of the display, the video card must send a number of bits equivalent to the color depth. So for a 32-bit color depth, every second it must send 32 bits times the number of pixels across (for example, 1024) times the number of pixels in height (for example, 768) times the refresh rate (for example, 75 Hz). That's a lot of bits. By setting the color depth down to 24-bit or even 16-bit, the video card doesn't have to work nearly as hard.

To decrease the color depth, display the Display Properties dialog box (right-click the desktop and select Properties) and on the Settings tab, change the Color quality setting, as shown in Figure 2-12. You might notice a little degradation in the quality of some photographs displaying on your monitor, but generally speaking 16-bit or 24-bit color is still pretty good and most people don't notice any difference.

Decreasing display resolution can also slightly improve video performance, but it's more of an annoyance because you have to get used to everything being larger onscreen. In addition, on an LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor, lower resolutions tend to look fuzzy.
Still squinting at the screen?
Even the best video card and tweaks in XP can't make the display look good on a small monitor. Upgrade to a flat-panel monitor from HP, designed to reduce eyestrain and fatigue.



Getting rid of Microsoft Windows Messenger

By default, Windows Messenger starts automatically when you start the PC. That's fine if you happen to use Windows Messenger, but most people don't, and it's just annoying.

You can prevent Microsoft Outlook Express from loading Windows Messenger by doing the following:

In Outlook Express, select Tools > Options.
On the General tab, clear the Automatically log on to Windows Messenger checkbox.
Click OK, close Outlook Express, and then open Windows Messenger itself.
Select Tools > Options.
On the Preferences tab, uncheck the Run Windows Messenger when Windows Starts checkbox.
(Optional) Uncheck the Allow Windows Messenger to run in the background checkbox. This forces it to close completely when you close its window.
Click OK.
Here's another way to turn off Windows Messenger for good--and this one is even simpler:

Open the Group Policy Editor. (Select Start > Run, type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.)
In the folder tree at the left, select Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Messenger.
Set the Do not allow Windows Messenger to be run setting to Enabled. To do this, double-click it, select Enabled, and then click OK.
Set the Do not automatically start Windows Messenger initially setting to Enabled.

Close the Group Policy window.

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