Powering Up – Part 3

Need for speed and other tweak tales.

Bill Bhai, muaf karna but of the scores of smirky stories swirling the hurly burly annals Microsoft folklore, this is one of my favourites: Kehtae hain, that in May 2003, popular American singer, songwriter, and multiple Grammy winner Christina Aguilera (www.christinaaguilera.com) was loitering around a Las Vegas tech show. As she stood staring seemingly perplexedly at a PC demoing Windows XP, a man came up to her, introduced himself and asked if he could help her. Presuming that he was trying to hit on her, she turned away muttering, "Thanks buddy, but I've already got a computer guy who can do that."

Seconds later she was told by her companions that the man who had introduced himself to her was none other than the one and only “Bill Gates”, Biggest Dada of Doodads and Dollars in the universe! Can’t say whether this was fact or fable. But the fundas that follow are decidedly factoids that will facilitate the fine-tuning your XP.

Defragging Your Boot
You know that defragging your hard disk regularly helps make PC vroom faster. By the same logic, placing relevant boot files adjacent to each other in your primary disk helps your PC boot faster as well. This option is enabled by default. To verify if things haven’t come unstuck over time, here’s what you need to do. Run Regedit (like we explained last time). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction. In the right pane here, ensure that the Data value in front of Enable is Y. Else right click on Enable, pick Modify and type in the value “Y”. And it’s time to reboot, Ronaldinho!

Nuking Names
When looking for a picture (or ten) in a cluttered Thumbnail view, sometimes you need to glimpse as many images as possible in one screen. You can easily maximise your viewing by turning off filenames and utilising the space vacated for more thumbnails. How? Press Shift when you open a folder. Or when you switch into Thumbnail view. Wants the filenames back? Repeat the process bhaktjano…

And Killing the Kuradaan
I told you how to bypass in Recycle Bin three weeks ago. But if, like me, you hate the very sight of the Recycle Bin on your Desktop, you can kill it and bury its entrails into the beyond. For this, run Regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/explorer/Desktop/SNameSpace. Here, click on the Recycle Bin string in the right pane. Hit Delete and click OK.

Living in the Shadows
Want to make your Desktop Icons look more interesting? Go to Control Panel > System, > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Visual Effects. Tick Use drop shadows for icon labels on the Desktop. Yup, that’s it.

Faster Finds
Sick of your PC’s slow snout? Make your files searches scamper like a super-charged Doberman by getting Windows to create a file index. For this, launch Search using the Windows key + F shortcut. In Change preferences (in the left pane), choose With Indexing Service (for faster local searches). Now go, baby go…

And Swifter Soul Searches
Talking about speedy searching for lost souls, here are a tiny tip: Next time, you’re looking for file/phrase via Windows Search, try using appropriate letter capitalisation. Yani kae, typing “Karan Johar” will produce results a mite faster than typing “karan johar” where your cases are all garbar.

Still can’t find “Karan Johar” on your PC and want to snoop around on the Net for him? Don’t bother to scramble off to Start or your Desktop for your browser icon. Just hit the Search the Internet button in the left pane of this very same Windows Search and key in “Karan Johar”.

Okay now, abhi alvida hai kehna...