At some time you will find yourself with very little space available on your hard disk. Simplest thing to do is to empty your Recycle Bin. This will remove some of unwanted files. But there is much more clutter around your hard disk, like temporary Internet files, downloaded program files, office setup files, setup log files, temporary files, offline files, compressed old files….
Remove all that clutter with Disk Cleanup Tool (included with Windows XP)
Continue reading
Same as Internet Explorer, Firefox stores all visited pages with images and sounds in cache (temporary Internet files). You should clear cache from time to time to allow Firefox to function more efficiently. Of course, if you are concerned about your privacy you should delete from time to time cookies, history, forms data and passwords. If you are having trouble accessing some web site, clearing cache might help.
Temporary Internet files or cache is folder with copies of all web pages you visited, including images, sounds and cookies. Cache makes Internet browsing faster because browser can display files from cache instead of downloading them. If cache grows to big, it can have negative affect on browsing speed and can make IE act sluggish. If you are concerned about your privacy you should delete cookies, history, auto complete and passwords from time to time.
If you have lots of programs open at the same time you will like this tool. Standard Alt-Tab window shows only application icon. When you have multiple windows of the same application open, it can be hard to find correct one. Microsoft PowerToy Task Switch can replace standard Alt-Tab view with one that not only shows application icon, but also preview (screenshot) of an application window.
Here is how you install this great tool.
One of Windows XP features is error reporting when application or system crashes. It offers to send error report to Microsoft. You might want to disable this feature if you don’t want to have information about your system sent to Microsoft, or if your computer is not connected to the Internet. You can disable this feature, or you can limit it to Windows operating system errors or only to specific programs you choose.
Here is how you do it.
While you are using your computer, files on your hard disk are becoming more and more fragmented. This happens because while saving files, system is trying to fill empty spaces. One file can bi split up in many parts around your hard drive. This slows down file access, system is starting up slower and everything becomes more sluggish.
Solution is to run disk defragmentation program.
There is a bug in MS Windows that can slow up network browsing. It can take up to 30 seconds to browse remote computer. Reason of this delay is that Windows is scanning remote computer for Scheduled tasks.
There is a simple registry tweak to fix this problem.
Control Panel applet in Windows operating system allows user to change system settings, software and hardware settings, adding and removing software, changing users permisions, and many more.
This article explains how to access it.
The Registry is a system database where Windows operating system and other software keep their settings. Registry Editor is a program that edits that database.
This is how you start it.
ClearType is Microsoft technology that improves font display on color LCDs. It does that by using RGB subpixels to antialias font edges.
It is simple to enable in Windows XP
You can make blue screen of death with few clicks. You might want to do this as a prank :-), or you need to save memory dump, or test your application if you are a developer. Microsoft included simple way to do this, you only need to enable it first.
More and more programs are running on Windows startup. Some of them do not even offer option “do not start with windows”. By using “System Configuration Utility” which is part of Windows operating system, you can disable programs that you do not want to startup.