*techwhack exclusive feature*
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 [...]

Don’t you hate it when some program just unilaterally changes your file associations — so all of your music opens up in Windows Media Player, instead of MusicMatch, for example? Well there’s utility that’ll give you back control of how Windows selects programs to open files. In addition to locking down associations, it also lets [...]

nLite – cut-down the size of your Windows CD, and more!
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 [...]

use unattended CDs to simplify Windows deployment
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 [...]

Windows Explorer caches DLLs (Dynamic-Link Libraries) in memory for a period of time after the application using them has been closed. This can be an inefficient use of memory.
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 [...]

SYMPTOMS
After you install Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), your programs may take as much as ten times as long to start.
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 [...]

This tweak will launch most executables with the priority setting you want it to have.
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 [...]

In Windows XP everytime you open My Computer to browse folders XP automatically searches for network files and printers. This causes a delay in displaying your icons. You probably see the “default” windows icon and as you scroll it changes to the correct icon. This is how to stop that…
1. Open My Computer
2. Click [...]

A great new feature in Microsoft Windows XP is the ability to do a boot defragment. This places all boot files next to each other on the disk to allow for faster booting. By default this option in enables but on some builds it is not so below is how to turn it on.
Start Regedit.
Navigate [...]

These Settings will fine tune your systems memory
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 [...]