XP Tweak Time - 2

Telling XP how to behave.

I'm still swimming in a deluge of responses to last week's XP tweaks column. Thanks folks. Am trying to reply to all of you. But no promises. Actually this happens every time I tickle this topic. What to do... XP ka mamla is like that only. Hear this: Apparently, some years ago Bill Gates was demoing a "new and improved" version of Windows to thousands of people at an annual techie convention, his PC froze and the infamous (and very familiar) Windows "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) appeared onscreen. But Gates carried on smilingly, without skipping a beat, saying, "I guess we still have to get some bugs out of this one.”

So let's tweak on... And may the System Gods protect the well being of thine and mine from BSOD.

Quicker Off the Blocks
The most frequent whine I hear from XP users is that it takes ages to start up. Here’s a temporary solution to help you ascertain how fast your PC can really boot sans all add-ons. Because this tweak disables all non-system services—including essential ones like antivirus proggies et al.

Click on Start and then Run. Type "msconfig" into the text field. Go to the Startup tab. Click on the Disable All button here. Then in the Services tab, check the Hide All Microsoft Service box and click Disable All. When you reboot, XP will reignite with just the system services and applications running. Result: A speedier startup. But I repeat, this is strictly a short term solution.


Flushing Fonts for Faster Booting
If you delight in curves of the font genre and have stockpiled a multitude of them in your font folder, you should stop getting grumpy about XP’s speed boss. A lot of your system load during boot up is due to the active fonts in your PC. Do you really use most of them most of time? Nahin na. So just flush them out of the Fonts folder. Keep them on the hard disk, but in another folder.

For this, make a new folder by right clicking on the desktop. Call it Extra Fonts. Next, open the Fonts folder via Start > Settings > Control Panel. Change your View to List or Details to locate font families easily. Shift-select all the fonts you don’t need on a regular basis and move them into the newly created Extra Fonts folder on our desktop. When you’re done, move this Extra Fonts folder to C: or My Documents. (From here, you can re-install whichever ones you want, whenever the need arises.)

If you’ve managed to neutralize loads of faltu fonts, you’ll notice the difference when you boot next. If there’s no difference, dump the flushed files back into the Fonts folder again. And curse me.


Killing the Welcome Screen
If you find the Welcome screen a tad tedious, here what you should do. Click on Start > Control Panel > User Accounts. Here pick "Change the way users log on or off". Next, uncheck the "Use the Welcome screen" option. And click "Apply Options". That’s it. Next time you reboot, no Welcome screen. You can also tinker around with the “Log on” option and see what you can come up with, including espying any hidden users of your system! Try karna. But meri pitai mut karna…

Lot and lots more hai, but I’m out space here. So maal more another time. Meanwhile here’s a tailpiece: Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the ubiquitous Windows reboot/flush app sequence was invented by a coder named David Bradley. And “auto-marketed" by the Big Bill!