myaistutorial

Tweaking Windows XP

Before we start tweaking, I recommend you set up a few things on your operating system.
Make sure you have Administrator privileges on the computer you are tweaking as some options may have been disabled for use by standard users. Also, there's ClearType. ClearType basically works to make text on your screen appear much clearer and readable - a massive boon for laptop owners.

To turn ClearType on, just access your Display properties in Control Panel,
then click on the 'Appearances' tab. Then click the 'Effects...' button.

Tick 'Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts...' and change the listbox to 'ClearType'.
Then just click OK, Apply, and close down your dialogs.

Tweak #1 - MsConfig

Most of you will be familiar with MsConfig, which is basically a built-in system configuration utility for Windows. Open it up by simply going to Start -> Run..., then type 'msconfig' in the box and press enter. Now, the tab we are interested in here is the 'Startup' tab...

This box displays all of the programs that will be started when Windows boots up. None of these programs are vital for Windows, so don't feel worried about removing some of them in experimentation. You can see from the screenshot that I have disabled both NDetect (ICQ's start-up program) and WinAmpa (WinAmp, obviously). Now, if you've unchecked some boxes, Windows should start up faster and will take less resources by not running these programs in the background.

Tweak #2 - More Startup Tweakage

Now we're going to take the tweak above and go one step futher. Go to Start -> Run again, then type 'services.msc'.

This is a more detailed list of processes that are starting up with Windows. All those items with 'Automatic' listed next to their names are booting with Windows. Click on the items to find out just what they do. If you decide you don't need a certain service, you can simply right-click on it and change it's properties from 'Automatic' to 'Manual'.

Tweak #3 - Speeding Up Internet Explorer

This is a handy little trick you can use with Internet Explorer 6 (which ships with XP) to make it boot up extremely fast - instantly, on my system :). This should be familiar to those of you who have created shortcuts for Half-Life mods and the like. For those of you who aren't familiar, simply right-click on a shortcut to Internet Explorer (such as the one in the Quicklaunch bar) and add the parameter '-nohome' to the end of the command line.

Tweak #4 - Menu Delays

Another minor and easy tweak to remove any delay from menus sliding out. For this you will need to use regedit (open regedit by going to Start -> Run..., then typing 'regedit' and pressing enter). The key you need to change is located in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. The actual key is called MenuShowDelay - all you have to do is change the value to 0. Remember, you will have to re-boot your computer for this tweak to take effect.

Tweak #5 - GPEDIT.MSC And Autoplay

A great tweaking file that comes with XP is gpedit.msc. Go to Start -> Run... and then type in 'gpedit.msc' and press enter. This is effectively the Policies Editor, and it comes in handy often. For example, if you hate CD autoplay like I do and want to permanently disable it, you can use this tool to do so. Just run gpedit.msc, then go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System. In here you can see the value 'Turn Off Autoplay'. Right-click on it and then click 'Properties'.

Now you can simply play around with the settings for this and other values in these folders, customizing appearance and performance issues.
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