Increasing Graphics Performance

 

By default, WindowsXP turns on a lot of shadows, fades, slides etc to menu items.

Most simply slow down their display.
To turn these off selectively:

1. Right click on the My Computer icon
2. Select Properties
3. Click on the Advanced tab
4. Under Performance, click on the Settings button
5. To turn them all of, select Adjust for best performance
6. My preference is to leave them all off except for Show shadows under mouse pointer and Show window contents while dragging

WindowsXP Command Line Utilities

While there are a lot of command line utilities in WindowsXP, here are some that I have been using lately.

bootcfg - Configures, queries, or changes Boot.ini file settings.

driverquery - Displays a list of all installed device drivers and their properties.

getmac - Returns the media access control (MAC) address and list of network protocols associated with each address for all network cards in each computer

gpresult - Displays Group Policy settings and Resultant Set of Policy (RSOP) for a user or a computer

netsh - You can use commands in the Netsh Interface IP context to configure the TCP/IP protocol

schtasks - Schedules commands and programs to run periodically or at a specific time

systeminfo - Displays detailed configuration information about a computer and its operating system

Turning Off the Guest Account

For security purposes, you might want to turn off the Guest account

1. Open up the Control Panel
2. Click on User Accounts
3. Click on Change an account
4. Click on the Guest account
5. Click Turn off the guest account

Opening a Command Prompt to a Particular Directory from Explorer

If you want to open a command prompt to a directory that is selected in the Explorer:

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT  \ Directory \ shell
3. Create a new key called Command
4. Give it the value of the name you want to appear in the Explorer. Something like Open DOS Box
5. Under this create a new key called command
6. Give it a value of cmd.exe /k "cd %L"
7. Now when you are in the Explorer, right click on a folder, select Open DOS Box, and a command prompt will open to  the selected directory.