Registry Tweaks to Enhance Your Windows XPerience Registry workarounds for tedious, but useful XP optimizations. You may ask yourselves, why should this article be any different from all those tweaking tutorials around the Internet or, better yet, why should you read this when you can install a program that does it all for you? Here's why: this article will help you make important changes to your system with just two windows opened: this one and a notepad. That's all! No need to click your way through dozens of windows, no need to go through the risk of pushing the wrong button and crashing your operating system.
Furthermore, you don't have to pay a single cent! Why pay for a program to do what you yourselves can do in just a few seconds? And last but not least, you will be able to choose from a list only the tweaks that you're interested in and then apply them on any computer, at any time with just a double-click. Tweaking can hardly get any easier than that! Think how cool that would be, especially after reinstalling Windows.
Let's start by creating the file that will do all the magic. Right-click on your desktop, create a new text document and name it tweaks.reg. Windows will ask if you're sure that you want to change the file extension – click Yes. Right-click the file and choose Edit: a blank notepad window will appear. There are two things you must keep in mind: first of all, for the magic to work your text document must start with 'Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00'. Secondly, later on, be very patient when copying something to paste it in your document. If you copy an incomplete text, the tweak will not work and you might alter other system settings.
As for the pieces of advice that will make your work easier when creating the tweaking file, just keep in mind two things: remember the purpose of each line (you can use comment lines in which you can write whatever you like as long as they start with a semicolon) and, of course, know that there's no problem in leaving a few lines empty between each tweak, to help you differentiate them.
Now here's a list of system tweaks for you to choose from. The idea is quite simple: I'll provide a few lines (the tweak) and a short explanation for what they do. If you're interested in seeing the tweak applied to your computer, all you have to do is paste the lines at the bottom (no, you can't paste them anywhere you like) of your tweaks.reg file.
To make sure I've got your attention, in this article I’ll post optimizations that are either impossible to apply in a conventional way (from Windows Explorer or Control Panel, for example) or possible, but pretty tedious, so getting your hands dirty in less known parts of Windows would normally be necessary in order to apply them.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer]
"NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001
It will deactivate the annoying "Low Disk Space" message that appears in your system tray each time one of your drives is almost full.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/policies/system]
"NoInternetOpenWith"=dword:00000001
This baby will remove the window that always pops up when you try opening a file that is not assigned to a program, asking you if you wish to go online and find out which program you should use to open that type of file. After applying this patch, you’ll see just the Open With window.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/CabinetState]
"Use Search Asst"="no"
I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of the old, classic search, without any "assistants." So if you don't like the Windows XP default search interface and prefer the classic from its predecessors, just add these lines to your tweaks.reg file.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Sound]
"Beep"="no"
"ExtendedSounds"="no"
If you haven't got the chance to install a sound driver, you've surely noticed the annoying beeps made by your motherboard each time an alert window pops up. After applying this tweak, you won't need to worry about these beeps anymore.
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/lnkfile]
"IsShortcut"=-
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/piffile]
"IsShortCut"=-
Add this tweak to your list if you don't want your Windows XP to constantly add the shortcut arrow each time you create a shortcut.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current/Version/Explorer/Advanced]
"ShowInfoTip"=dword:00000000
If you find the tool tips containing information displayed by Windows when hovering a file with your mouse rather bothersome, adding this optimization to your tweaks.reg file will help you get rid of them.
I'll stop here and be back soon to continue my list with a lot more interesting tweaks in a future article. So all you have to do now is save the contents of the tweaks.reg window, close it and then double-click it. Windows will ask if you wish to add the information stored in tweaks.reg to your registry. If you're sure you've followed each step correctly, go right ahead and press Yes.
In the meantime, if you know any other cool tweaks or had problems creating the tweaks file, just post a comment to this article and have your say.
Source: news.softpedia.com
Monday, October 27, 2008
Registry Tweaks to Enhance Your Windows XPerience
Sysinternals Update: Process Monitor 2.01 for Vista and XP
Sysinternals Update: Process Monitor 2.01 for Vista and XP But also DebugView 4.76, AccessChk 4.21, Autoruns 9.35. Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, software architects in the Core Operating Systems Division, introduced the 2.0 major update to Process Monitor at the end of September 2008. Now, the tool has been taken one step further to version 2.01, this time just a minor refresh designed mainly to deal with a few issues associated with v2.0. The Process Monitor 2.01 release is an integral part of a larger update of the Sysinternals suite involving other three applications: Autoruns 9.35, DebugView 4.76, and AccessChk 4.21.
“Process Monitor v2.01 - this release fixes several bugs, including compatibility with Windows 2000, excessive exit delays, and adds the new networking events to the filter dialog's operations list,” explained Curtis Metz, Program Manager, Microsoft Sysinternals. Back in September, version 2.0 of Process Monitor brought real-time TCP and UDP monitoring.
Delivering network tracing capabilities to Process Monitor was Russinovich's next step in the evolution of the utility. Taking Process Monitor from version 1.0 to 2.0 involved adding new low-level capabilities, such as a stronger focus on system memory usage in addition to network tracing.
“Autoruns 9.35 - this Autoruns update adds additional autostart locations, including lsastart, s0initialization, savedumpstart, and servicecontrollerstart, and fixes several bugs,” Metz added. “DebugView 4.76 - debugview no longer truncates the last character of each line of a log file when it loads one back into the display. AccessChk 4.21 - this fixes a bug in the code that checks for malformed security descriptors that could cause spurious warnings.”
The new versions of the four updated utilities have also caused the entire Sysinternals Suite to be refreshed. As of October 16, Microsoft is serving a new release of the Sysinternals Suite now complete with all the touched-up utilities: Process Monitor 2.01, DebugView 4.76, AccessChk 4.21, Autoruns 9.35.
Process Monitor 2.01 is available for download here.
The Sysinternals Suite is available for download here.
Source: news.softpedia.com
Download Process Monitor 2.0 for Vista and XP
At the start of September 2008, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich revealed that he was cooking a major update for Process Monitor, one of the components of the Sysinternals suite. As of September 30, version 2.0 of Process Monitor became available for download. The description of the tool authored by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell reveals that Process Monitor 2.0 is designed to integrate seamlessly with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 2000 SP4 with Update Rollup 1, Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Vista.
“Process Monitor v2.0: this major update to Process Monitor adds real-time TCP and UDP monitoring to its existing process, thread, DLL, file system and registry monitoring. You can now see the TCP and UDP activity processes performed, including the operation (e.g. connect, send, receive), local and remote IP addresses and DNS names, and operation transfer lengths. On Windows Vista, Process Monitor also collects thread stacks for network operations,” revealed Curtis Metz, Program Manager, Microsoft Sysinternals.
Concomitantly with the new release of Process Monitor 2.0, the entire Sysinternals suite was update and is also available for download. Russinovich refreshed two additional utilitoes on top of Process Monitor 2.0, namely Sigcheck and Contig. “Sigcheck v1.54: this Sigcheck release fixes a bug in CSV output formatting. Contig v1.55: Contig now supports the -accepteula command-line switch,” Metz added.
Via Process Monitor 2.0, users will be able to monitor in real time the file system of the Windows operating system along with the platform's registry and process/thread activity. Back in early September, Russinovich promised that Process Monitor would indeed evolve with the addition of new low-level capabilities, including a more intimate focus on memory usage, while at the same time delivering network tracing to the utility.
Process Monitor 2.0 is available for download here.
The Sysinternals Suite is available for download here.
Source: news.softpedia.com