Showing the Control Panel in My Computer

In Windows XP, you can show the control panel icon when opening "My Computer."

To do so, follow these steps:-

1. Double-click My Computer to open it.

2. Click Tools-->Folder Options.

3. Under the View tab, check the box which says Show Control Panel in My Computer.

4. Click OK to save your changes.

Drag Files into Notepad

You can read the text from any file by dragging the file from Windows Explorer into notepad. For example, if you wanted to read a .cfg file, you can open notepad and then drag the file into notepad to read the configurations stored in the file.

Here's how to do it :-

1. Open Notepad by clicking Start-->All Programs-->Accessories-->Notepad.

2. Open Windows Explorer and browse to the file from which you want to read text.

3. Drag and drop the file from Windows Explorer into Notepad. The text in the file appears in notepad.

Boot Winxp Fast

Follow the following steps :

1. Open notepad.exe, type "del c:\windows\prefetch\ntosboot-*.* /q" (without the quotes) & save as "ntosboot.bat" in c:\

2. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "gpedit.msc".

3. Double click "Windows Settings" under "Computer Configuration" and double click again on "Shutdown" in the right window.

4. In the new window, click "add", "Browse", locate your "ntosboot.bat" file & click "Open".

5. Click "OK", "Apply" & "OK" once again to exit.

6. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "devmgmt.msc".

7. Double click on "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"

8. Right click on "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties".

9. Select the "Advanced Settings" tab then on the device 0 or 1 that doesn't have 'device type' greyed out select 'none' instead of 'autodetect' & click "OK".

10. Right click on "Secondary IDE channel", select "Properties" and repeat step 9.

11. Reboot your computer.

Method to Reinstall Internet Explorer 6.0

To do so follow these steps:

Insert the Windows XP CD in your CD drive.

Open Start / Run and type:

rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132

c:\windows\inf\ie.inf

(in one long line. Just copy/paste the above entry)

Press ENTER

You can also use the I386 folder from the CD, just copy it to your HD, but make sure you change the installation path to the new location.

Change Text on XP start button

Step 1 - Modify Explorer.exe File

In order to make the changes, the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows needs to be edited. Since explorer.exe is a binary file it requires a special editor. For purposes of this article I have used Resource Hacker. Resource HackerTM is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.

get this from http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/ftp/tools/ResHack.zip

The first step is to make a backup copy of the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer. Place it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive where it will be safe. Start Resource Hacker and open explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe.

The category we are going to be using is "String Table". Expand it by clicking the plus sign then navigate down to and expand string 37 followed by highlighting 1033. If you are using the Classic Layout rather than the XP Layout, use number 38. The right hand pane will display the stringtable. We’re going to modify item 578, currently showing the word “start” just as it displays on the current Start button.

There is no magic here. Just double click on the word “start” so that it’s highlighted, making sure the quotation marks are not part of the highlight. They need to remain in place, surrounding the new text that you’ll type. Go ahead and type your new entry. In my case I used Click Me!

You’ll notice that after the new text string has been entered the Compile Script button that was grayed out is now active. I won’t get into what’s involved in compiling a script, but suffice it to say it’s going to make this exercise worthwhile. Click Compile Script and then save the altered file using the Save As command on the File Menu. Do not use the Save command – Make sure to use the Save As command and choose a name for the file. Save the newly named file to C:\Windows.

Step 2 – Modify the Registry!!!

make a backup of your registry before making changes!!!

Now that the modified explorer.exe has been created it’s necessary to modify the registry so the file will be recognized when the user logs on to the system. If you don’t know how to access the registry I’m not sure this article is for you, but just in case it’s a temporary memory lapse, go to Start (soon to be something else) Run and type regedit in the Open field. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Winlogon

In the right pane, double click the "Shell" entry to open the Edit String dialog box. In Value data: line, enter the name that was used to save the modified explorer.exe file. Click OK.

Close Registry Editor and either log off the system and log back in, or reboot the entire system if that’s your preference. If all went as planned you should see your new Start button with the revised text.

Install Windows XP on Your Pre-Installed

Windows Vista Computer

The question I am asked most often is "How do I install a dual-boot with Windows XP on my new Windows Vista computer?" The answer is that it's not that difficult, it's just very time consuming, and you need to own a copy of Windows XP.

Note that you should not attempt this if you aren't ready to troubleshoot any problems that might occur.
The first issue we encounter is that computers with pre-installed operating systems take up the entire drive. Luckily Microsoft included the Shrink volume feature in Vista, so we can easily shrink the Vista partition down to make room for XP.

Open the Computer Management panel, which you can find under Administrative tools or by right-clicking the Computer item in the start menu and choosing Manage. Find the Disk Management item in the list and select that.

Now we'll shrink our volume down by right-clicking on the main hard drive and choosing Shrink Volume.

Now you can choose the size that you want to shrink, which really means you are choosing the size that you want your XP partition to be. Whatever you do, don't just use the default. I chose roughly 10gb by entering 10000 into the amount.

The next step might be confusing, because we need to change the cd-rom drive that's invariably taking up D: at the moment, because we want to use D: for the Windows XP partition, but it's already taken by the cd-rom drive. If you skip this step than XP will install onto the E: drive, which isn't the end of the world, but it's not quite as tidy.

Right-click on the cd-rom drive in the list and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.

Now we'll change the CD drive to use E: by selecting that in the drop-down.

Now we can create a new partition for XP to live on and make sure that the drive letter is set the way we want. If you do not create a partition now the XP install will do so automatically, but it's easier and cleaner to do it this way.

Right-click on the Unallocated free space area and then select New Simple Volume from the menu.

Follow through the wizard and select whatever options you'd like, making sure to use D: as the drive letter.
Now you will need to close out of disk management and reboot your computer. This is because we can't do the next step until we reboot. (you can try, but it won't work)

So we've come back from rebooting… open up Computer from the start menu and then right-click on the D: drive and select properties.

Give your partition a meaningful name like "XP". It would be wise to name the C: drive to "Vista" at this point as well.

Now you'll want to pop your XP cd into the drive and boot off it. You may have to configure your BIOS to enable booting off the CD drive, or if your computer says something like "Hit Esc for boot menu" you might want to use that.

Once you come to the screen where you can choose the partition to install on, then choose either the unpartitioned space or the new partition you created. Whatever you do, don't try and install onto your Vista partition! See how much cleaner it is now that we've labeled each partition distinctly?

We'll assume XP is completely installed at this point, and you will have lost your ability to boot into Windows Vista, so we'll need to use the VistaBootPro utility to restore the Vista boot loader.

Download and install VistaBootPro from vistabootpro.org

During the install you'll be forced to install the .NET 2.0 framework. Open up VistaBootPRO and then click on the System Bootloader tab. Check the "Windows Vista Bootloader" and then "All Drives" radio buttons, and then click on the Install Bootloader button.

At this point, the Windows Vista bootloader is installed and you'll only be able to boot into Vista, but we'll fix that. Instead of manually doing the work, we'll just click the Diagnostics menu item and then choose Run Diagnostics from the menu.

This will scan your computer and then automatically fill in the XP version.. click on the "Manage OS Entries" tab and then click in the textbox for Rename OS Entry, and name it something useful like "Windows XP" or "The Windows That Works"

Click the Apply Updates button and then reboot your computer… you should see your shiny new boot manager with both operating systems in the list!

If you get an error saying "unable to find ntldr" when trying to boot XP, you'll need to do the following:Find the hidden files ntldr and ntdetect.com in the root of your Vista drive and copy them to the root of your XP drive.

If you can't find the files there, you can find them in the \i386\ folder on your XP install cd

This is a critical piece of information: Windows XP will be installed on the D: drive, even in Windows XP… so you'll need to keep that in mind when tweaking your system.

You can share information between the drives, but I wouldn't recommend messing with the other operating system's partition too much… it might get angry and bite you. Or screw up your files. What I do recommend is that you store most of your files on a third drive shared between the operating systems… you could call that partition "Data".

Enjoy...But,..Be a little careful..!