Towards the end of this year, when Windows XP’s latest update (Service Pack 2) is satisfactorily rolled-out we are going to see a media blitz. Looks like Microsoft favours letting a year or two roll-by, and getting a good service pack out of the door, before advertising in public media about their OS and office suites.

Preliminary speculation says that its going to be a package (XP integrated with SP2 + Windows Media Player 10) promoted as an OS different from what you knew WinXP to be. Its not a retail product – its not a new version of windows.

Most of the components that will form part of the XP reloaded campaign are out. Today, we will see a short guide to make for yourself the Windows XP Reloaded CD.

You need:
1. Your Current licensed Windows XP CD (professional or home edition).

2. Service Pack 2 (download the appropriate version for your language)

3. Follow one of these guides to update your Windows XP install-source. (to install integrated with SP2 by default – saves on time, and gives you peace-of-mind)
The D-I-Y guide –OR– Universal Windows Slipstreaming and Bootable CD Guide

4. Download the Windows Media Player 10

5. Download the .NET framework 1.1 and the update for it (SP1).

6. Additional tools download and info for XP SP2.

Put it all in one place, and burn a CD. Enjoy having something that isn’t even on the store shelves as yet.

AppLauncher

Hey, some of us are bothered about the existence of utilities we never use in windows. If you feel so too, this tool is for you. It is to be used on an existing Windows 2000/XP/2003 installer CD – it will aid you in removing the like of Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, Outlook Express, and so on. Basically, it will de-integrate all the junk that should never have been part of windows. Then, when you install from the newly created “nLite”ened CD, you will have a squeaky clean windows.

Its possible to have a 160 MB windows XP installer, which when installed occupies 400 MB on the hard-disk. Amazing by any measure! Competing tools, like XPlite are not as good because of two reasons – the others aren’t free, and they are usable only *AFTER* installing WindowsXP – so you don’t have a clean setup to begin with.

nLite also assists you in slip-streaming (merging) the latest Service Pack into a supported version of a Windows CD. It also allows you to create basic unattended setups.

The really beautiful thing about it is, the levels of acceptance and usage it is seeing. Many home users, and lots more IT-pros use nLite to slim-down their install. In fact, if imitation and usage by the under-ground of the software audience is a measure of popularity, nLite has already climbed very high up that ladder – lots of warez sites host it, or bundle it along with downloads of unlicensed Windows XP CD-images, LOL.

It started out as a personal tool by an MSFN forums member {name – Dino Nuhagic (nuhi)}, after he collected enough info about eliminating components. Then, friends and members of MSFN encouraged him to develop the tool further. And now it has acquired a professional quality, but still is free.

Its clear that he’s not doing it for himself alone, anymore – would be nice if some people could donate (link to donate is on the home-page of the tool) to encourage him to continue the good work.

nLite forums
nLite project home

You can make customized Windows XP CDs for deployment within your company. Make your CDs in such a way that they already are updated to the latest Service Pack, have all patches installed, and all the applications you need, and the settings you need to pre-configure every-time. You save tremendously on time and you gain the advantage of reproducibility (you can keep installing 100 client machines, and still not miss having done even 1 task because its all automated).

To know more, see MSFN’s official here : http://unattended.msfn.org.

Once you have an unattended CD up and running fine, you start to want more things – which is when you would make a multi-boot windows installer DVD.

See the detailed tutorial here.

1. Find the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer].
2. Create a new DWORD sub-key named ‘AlwaysUnloadDLL’ and set the default value to equal ‘1′ to disable Windows caching the DLL in memory.
3. Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

CAUSE
This problem may occur if the programs you run frequently allocate and deallocate large blocks of memory. Changes in Windows XP SP1 in the memory management system have caused this operation to take significantly longer than with pre-SP1 Windows XP.

RESOLUTION
A supported fix is now available from Microsoft, but it is only intended to correct the problem that is described in this article. Apply it only to computers that are experiencing this specific problem. This fix may receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, Microsoft recommends that you wait for the next Windows XP service pack that contains this fix.

To resolve this problem immediately, contact Microsoft Product Support Services to obtain the fix. For a complete list of Microsoft Product Support Services phone numbers and information about support costs, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

Microsoft.com

NOTE: In special cases, charges that are ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem. The typical support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for the specific update in question.

The English version of this fix has the file attributes (or later) that are listed in the following table. The dates and times for these files are listed in coordinated universal time (UTC). When you view the file information, it is converted to local time. To find the difference between UTC and local time, use the Time Zone tab in the Date and Time tool in Control Panel.

Date Time Version Size File name
—————————————————–
28-Feb-2003 14:05 5.1.2600.1177 654.336 Ntdll.dll

Heres a link to the patch.

Download Service Pack 1 “Slowdown Patch” (English)

Let’s say you have a game installed called HIGH NEEDS and the executable is called HN.exe

Here’s what to do:

-Create a new textfile in the game-app wathever-directory (let’s say C:\HN), but instead of giving it the .txt extension you name it HN.bat
-Right-click this file and choose ‘Edit’, you’ll see it’ll open notepad. Put this line in:
cmd /c start /High NH.exe
-Save (make sure you save it as .bat, not as .txt) and close.

Now create a shortcut to this file and place it on your desktop. Every time you doubleclick this shortcut HIGH NEEDS will open with priority set to ‘high’. (ofcourse you can also create a batchfile on your desktop, containing the full path of the app you want to start but the nice thing of creating a shortcut is you can give it an icon).

These are all the settings: Realtime, High, AboveNormal, Normal, BelowNormal, Low.

*Realtime is not recommended unless you have a dual-CPU system!

1. Open My Computer
2. Click on the Tools menu and select Folder Options…
3. Under Folder Options select the view tab.
4. Uncheck the very first box that reads “Automatically search for network folders and printers”.
5. Click “Apply” or “OK”

You should see a dramatic increase in speed when Windows displays your icons.

Start Regedit.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftDfrgBootOptimizeFunction
Select Enable from the list on the right.
Right on it and select Modify.
Change the value to Y to enable and N to disable.
Reboot your computer.

management -atleast 256MB of ram recccomended

go to start runregedit -and then to the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management

1.DisablePagingExecutive -double click it and in the decimal put a 1 – this allows XP to keep data in memory now instead of paging sections of ram to harddrive yeilds faster performance.

2.LargeSystemCache- double click it and change the decimal to 1 -this allows XP Kernal to Run in memory improves system performance alot

3.create a new dword and name it IOPageLockLimit – double click it and set the value in hex – 4000 if you have 128MB of ram or set it to 10000 if you have 256MB set it to 40000 if you have more than 512MB of ram -this tweak will speed up your disckcache

Reboot and watch your system fly.