Put command prompt on the right context menu

To be able to right click on any folder and open a command prompt in that folder perform the following -

1. Run regedit
2. Navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Directory \ shell
3. Right click and select New, then Key
4. Name the new key CommandPrompt
5. Double click on (Default) in the right pane and change the data value to Command Prompt Here
6. Right click the new Command key and select New, then Key
7. Name the new key Command, too
8. Double click (Default) again
9. Change the data value of this one to: cmd.exe /k cd %1
10. Close the registry editor

Now when you right click a folder, you should see the selection "Command Prompt Here" in the menu.

Changing XP Prefetch settings

To change settings for your Prefetch folder run Regedit.

You can change the way that Prefetch behaves by making a change in the registry. This is helpful when you want to alter Prefetch or disable Prefetch completely. Low resource (memory, hard disk space, etc) systems may need this functionality disabled to get the system to run more efficiently.

Navigate to this value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

In the right side pane, look for the key named EnablePrefetcher. The value of this key represents how Prefetch will operate.

Values you can choose from include:

0: Disable
1: Application Launch Prefetch
2: Boot Prefetch
3: Prefetch everything

Simply type the number in that you want (keep all other settings the same) and click OK. Rebooting the system will give you the new Prefetch setting.

Address Bar removed in Windows XP SP3

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) removes the "Address bar" option as an available Taskbar tool. It's believed that Microsoft removed this option so not to be in violation of certain antitrust rulings, especially in the European Union.

Getting it back -

The file modified by the installation of SP3 is browseui.dll. The trick is to replace this file with the SP2 version of the file. The older version of the file can be found in C:\Windows\System32 on any non-SP3 machine.

Copy this file to the root directory of the SP3 machine or to some other location that the SP3 PC can access.

Here is where it gets a little tricky. The browseui.dll file is a system file and is therefore protected whenever Windows is running. That means you cannot just copy the SP2 version file over the SP3 version file. You will need to start the PC in "Safe Mode with a command prompt" or boot to a bootable CD, i.e. WinPE.

Once there issue the following command:
copy browseui.dll C:\Windows\System32\

Reboot the PC. If all went well, you should now have the option to add the Address Bar toolbar.

IE7 - Enable Third-party Browser Extensions

Manual steps to disable third-party tool bands and Browser Helper Objects

To manually disable the tool bands and Browser Helper Objects, follow these steps:

1. Close all instances of Internet Explorer, click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
2. Double-click Internet Options.
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Under Browsing, click to clear the Enable third-party browser extensions (requires restart) check box.
5. Restart Internet Explorer.

These steps change the value data for the "Enable Browser Extensions" string value to "No" in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Configure Device Manager to show details

How to Configure Device Manager in XP to Display Detailed Informtaion

To configure Device Manager to show details:

1. Click Start, click Run, type: cmd.exe, and then press ENTER.
2. Type: set DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS=1, and then press ENTER.
3. Type: start devmgmt.msc, and then press ENTER.

In Device Manager the properties for a device should now provide a Details tab that contains additional information about the device.

You can view the Details tab to see the following device information:
Device Instance ID, Hardware IDs, Compatible IDs, Matching Device ID, Service, Enumerator, Capabilities, Devnode Flags, Config Flags, CSConfig Flags, Ejection Relations, Removal Relations, Bus Relations, Device Upper Filters, Device Lower, Filters, Class Upper Filters, Class Lower Filters, Class Installer, Class Coinstallers, Device Coinstallers, Firmware Revision, Current Power State, Power Capabilities, Power State Mappings.

NOTE: Not all of these properties will be populated for a given device. In other words, although all of these properties are listed, some may not contain information when viewing a particular device.

Disable Search from Address Bar

The default action in Internet Explorer if you type in an address of a web site that can't be found is for the value that you typed in to be passed to the default search engine (usually MSN). This means that if you use the address bar for its intended use of entering web addresses and you miskey an address that you then waste a whole lot of time waiting for the search to run when you didn't want to request a search in the first place. Fortunately a minor settings change can fix this.

To keep the address bar for addressses and use search option when you want to run a search go into:

• Internet Explorer
• Select Tools\Internet Options
• Select the Advanced tab
• Scroll down to the "Search from Address bar" section
• Set it to "Do not search from the Address bar"
• Save setting

Quickly gather MAC addresses with ARP

When securing a wireless Windows XP network, in addition to using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption, you can use Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering.

When you enable MAC address filtering, the wireless access point or wireless router verifies that the network card in the computer requesting access has a MAC address in its filter list before allowing the computer to access the network. This means that you must first obtain the MAC addresses of each client computer. To do so, you might think that you have to manually visit each computer and use the Getmac command.

An easier way to gather MAC addresses is to take advantage of the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) command. Here’s how:

1 - From one computer, use the Ping command to Ping each of the other client computers that will connect to the wireless access point or wireless router.

2 - Type the ARP command along with the -a parameter: Arp -a

When used with the -a parameter, the ARP command displays the ARP cache, which stores the IP and MAC addresses of the computers that most recently accessed the system — or in this case, those computers that responded to the Ping command.

Note: This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Professional.

View non-present devices in Device Manager

When troubleshooting driver problems in Windows XP, one of the first places you may look is Device Manager, which provides detailed information about every piece of installed system hardware. However, with devices such as removable USB drives, you may need information about devices that are not currently connected; Device Manager recognizes these as nonpresent devices. Here’s how to get information about those devices:

1 - Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.

2 - In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.

3 - In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.

4 - In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.

5 - Click OK twice.

6 - To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.

7 - Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

Note: This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.

Windows XP’s built-in image resizing utility

If you’ve ever had to resize a group of digital picture files, you’ve likely launched your image editing program and then resized each image individually — this is an extremely time-consuming task. Windows XP has a built-in image resizing utility buried inside the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box that can quickly and easily resize a large group of digital picture files at once. Follow these steps:

1. Press [Windows]E to launch Windows Explorer.
2. Make sure the Tasks pane is visible. (The Folders button acts like a toggle switch. If the Tree pane is showing, clicking the Folders button will display the Tasks pane. Click the Folders button if the Tree pane is showing.)
3. Open the folder containing the group of digital pictures you want to resize. Select the group.
4. Under the File And Folder Task list, select the E-Mail The Selected Items command.
5. When you see the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box, click the Show More Options link to expand the dialog box.
6. Select a radio button next to one of the available sizes and click OK. A new mail message window containing the resized digital pictures as attachments will appear.
7. Pull down the File menu, select the Save Attachments command, and save all the attachments to a different folder.
8. Close the mail message window and click No in the Save Changes dialog box.

Note: This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.

How to change default settings for taskbar grouping

Windows XP will, by default, group open program windows on the taskbar if you have three or more from the same program. This saves space on the taskbar and makes for a more organized look. Some folks, though, want to see each program instance as an individual taskbar icon. You can accomplish that by changing the default setting to a higher number. Here's how:

1. Open the registry editor and navigate to this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced
2. In the right pane, double click or create (if it doesn't exist) a DWORD value called TaskbarGroupSize
3. The default setting for the data value is 3. You can change this to whatever number you wish. For example, if you change it to 8, items will not group until you have 8 or more of the same program open.

As always, make a backup of the registry before editing.

Don't display program in Frequently Used Programs list

Don't display program in Frequently Used Programs list (Windows XP)

There's a registry edit you can use to permanently exclude a specific program from appearing on the list. Here's how to do that:

1. Open your favorite registry editor and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ FileAssocation
2. In the right pane, double click AddRemoveApps
3. Add the program you want to exclude to the Value Data box by typing a semicolon followed by the name of the program's executable file (for example: type ;sol.exe for Solitaire)
4. Close the registry editor and reboot. Remember, always make a backup of the registry key before you make changes to it.

If you're super secretive and don't want any of the programs you use to be displayed, you can edit the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties. There you can set the number of entries allowed to populate this section. If you change the setting to zero, this prevents any programs from being displayed.

Test Adobe Shockwave & Flash Players

Click the link to Test Adobe Shockwave & Flash Players

This also provides the installed version information for Adobe Shockwave and Flash Player.

HowTo: Clear XP MRU List

Clearing the Windows XP Map Network Drives MRU List

If you frequently use the Map Network Drive command in Windows XP, you probably have a lot of network paths displaying in the MRU (Most Recently Used) list, which appears in the Folder drop down menu. If so, you may at some point in time want to clear that list — especially if it contains UNC paths that you no longer use.

Here’s how to clear the Map Network Drive’s MRU list:

1. Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe)
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Map Network Drive MRU
3. One-by-one, delete each string value associated with a drive mapping by selecting it and pressing the Delete key. (Each entry will have the name of a letter of the alphabet, e.g. a, b, c, etc.)
4. Double-click on the entry titled MRUList to open the Edit String dialog box
5. Delete the text in the Value Data text box and click OK
6. Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows

MS .NET Framework

The steps below resolve the following error, or a similar error, when attempting to install Microsoft .NET v2.0 -

Error creating process.
Reason: C:\WINDOWS\system32\advpack.dll

1. Save the .NET Framework setup on your local drive - dotnetfx.exe
2. Extract the package by executing the following: dotnetfx.exe /c
3. You will be prompted to enter a path to extract the files to, i.e. C:\Temp\MS.Net
4. Go that that location and launch install.exe

HowTo: Register OS Files

To re-register Windows XP OS files:

1. Launch a CMD prompt
2. Change directories to C:\Windows\System32
3. Issue "REGSVR32 xxxxx.xxx", where xxxxx.xxx is the name of the file, i.e. comdlg32.oc (issue without the quotes).

Adobe Flash Player Help

Click here to the Abobe Flash Player Global Notifications Settings Panel.

Add Pop-up Folder Descriptions

Add Detailed Pop-up Descriptions to Folder Icons in Windows XP

When you hover your mouse pointer over a folder icon, you see a pop-up that contains the folder's size and the names of the first few files or folders it contains. There are cases when this information, along with the folder's name, is helpful in identifying the folder's contents; however, there are other times when you have to open the folder to really see what's in it.

You can add a detailed explanation about the folder's contents to the pop-up by creating a Desktop.ini file, which is a straight text file, and adding a special entry to it. In order for this technique to work, you have to assign an icon to the folder. Here's how:

1. Right-click the folder and select Properties.
2. From the Properties dialog box, select the Customize tab, and then click the Change Icon button.
3. In the Change Icon dialog box, select an icon from the selections and click OK.
4. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
5. Open the folder, locate the Desktop.ini file, and double-click it.
6. Add InfoTip= to the end of the Desktop.ini file.
7. Type your detailed description immediately after the = sign.
8. Go to File Save and close Notepad.

You'll see your detailed pop-up description the next time you mouse over that folder.

Note: If you don't see a pop-up when you mouse over a folder, you need to enable a couple of settings. Go to Tools Folder Options and then select the View tab. Then, in the Advanced Settings list, select the check boxes for Display File Size Information In Folder Tips and Show Pop-Up Description For Folder And Desktop Items. Click OK.

Registry Settings for the Start Menu in Windows XP

Click here to learn more Registry Settings for the Start Menu in Windows XP

Analyzing your Browser

Click here to analyze your browser - BrowserHawk

Test your Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

Click here to Test your Java Virtual Machine (JVM)