Underground And Other Stuff

This tip will help you remove annoying programs such as MSN Messenger that do not normally show up in the Add/Remove programs list. In order to do this, you need to open Windows Explorer and do the following:

1.) Navigate to C:\Windows\Inf
2.) Make a copy of Sysoc.inf for backup
3.) Open the original Sysoc.inf file and it will open in Notepad
4.) Press Ctrl-H and replace the string ",hide" with ",," and save the file.

After doing this you should be able to see all of the hidden programs in Add/Remove (located in the Control Panel).

This is a cool tool that most of you may not have heard about. As most of you know, when you press Alt+Tab on your keyboard you can cycle between programs you have running. With this PowerToy, you get a cool little GUI when switching so that you can choose exactly what program you want to switch to. It even gives you a preview of each thing you have running so that you can find exactly what you want. To use it, you have to hold Alt and Tab at the same time and then release and press tab to scroll through the programs. When you find the one you want, just release both buttons and it will switch to the one you selected. This program, which is for Windows XP only, is ideal for those of you who run a lot of programs at once and need to quickly switch between them. Go download this useful little program now, its free!

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PowerToys Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Download Link:
download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/TaskswitchPowertoySetup.exe

Here's a quick tip which might help you in navigating your taskbar and desktop. You can highlight and close multiple taskbar windows at once by using the same syntax you use for selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer. To do this:

1.)Hold down the CTRL key and click on each taskbar item you want closed.
2.)When you are done selecting them, release CTRL and the mouse button.
3.)They will all become selected, and you can right click on any one of them and choose 'close group' to close all selected windows.

Now Firefox and some other browsers have a "Close all Windows" feature, but this one allows you to close just the ones you want.

f you want to allow faster booting by having Windows XP, enable boot defrag. This will put all of the boot files together on the hard drive for faster access. To do this:

1.) Go to "Start-->Run" and enter "Regedit" in the box. Hit OK.
2.) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizerFunction.
3.) Select "Enable" from the list on the right.
4.) Right click on it and select "Modify"
5.) Change the value in the box to "Y" to enable it; "N" of course means it's disabled.
6.) Reboot the computer and you're all set.

If you have tons of programs you use on your PC on a daily basis, you may want to have a little extra room in your start menu for quick access. To do this, you can remove the "Frequently Used Programs" list from the start menu completely. This will open up that big white space on the left that you see when you click your start menu. To do this:

1.) Go to "Start-->Run" and in the command prompt, enter "Regedit" and hit "OK".
2.) When this opens, navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer"
3.) Create a new DWORD value by right-clicking in the window to the right and call it "NoStartMenuMFUprogramsList".
4.) Right-click on this new DWORD and click "Modify". In the "Value" box, change the 0 to a 1 and hit Enter.
5.) Reboot the computer and you're all set.

After doing this, you can add your own shortcuts to the list by dragging and dropping them into the Start Menu where you please.

If you like to install your files on a specific drive or partition other than the default “Program Files” directory, this tip may be just the thing for you. To change the directory, do as follows:

1.) Go to “StartRun” and enter “Regedit” in the prompt. Hit enter.
2.) Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion”.
3.) Double click on the “ProgramFilesDir” value in the right window.
4.) Change the value to the directory you want to be the default installation folder. Hit enter.
5.) Reboot the computer for the setting to take effect.

Whether you’re doing finances or math homework, you might notice that you can put the Windows calculator to some use. However, its functionality leaves some to be desired. The good news is that Microsoft has released a free enhancement for that in the form of a “Calculator Plus”. This new tool provides numerous conversions for measurements as well as European currencies. This would be perfect for those of you heading to Europe and happen to take your notebook with you. The best part is that it’s completely free!

Download it Here.

If your system has a pretty large amount of RAM (around 1GB or greater), this tip should noticeably boost your system performance. This tip will force the core Windows system to be kept in memory and not paged to disk. To do this:

1.) Go to "Start-->Run" and in the prompt, enter "regedit". Hit Enter.
2.) Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTECurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management"
3.) In the list of DWORDS on the right, you should see one called "DisablePagingExecutive".
4.) Right-click on the value and go to "Modify".
5.) In the "Value" box, change the 0 to a 1 to disable system paging.
6.) Hit okay and restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

This tip works on Windows NT/2000/XP. If you don't notice a performance increase, you can just change this back to default by doing all of the above steps and switching the value back to 0. Good luck!

If you love to store tons of data on your hard drive without thinking about how much space you take up, you might experience the "Disk Cleanup Warning". Windows XP automatically determines if it is too low on space and if this is true it gives an annoying warning message until you delete some files. If you don't mind running on low disk space, then do this to remove the warning:

1.) Go to "Start Run" and type in "regedit" in the box. Hit enter.
2.) Navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer".
3.) In the box to the right, right-click and go to "New DWORD Value"
4.) Name the value "NoLowDiskSpaceChecks".
5.) Right-click the new DWORD and go to "Properties". Enter 1 for the value and hit enter.
6.) Close Regedit and reboot the computer.

There you have it, no more annoying message!

If you are ever troubleshooting DLL's on your system, this registry entry can help save you time. It allows you to right click on a DLL file and select the option to register or unregister it.

Just copy this into a text file and save it as "dllreg.reg", run the file and try it.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.dll]
"Content Type"="application/x-msdownload"
@="dllfile"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/dllfile]
@="Application Extension"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/dllfile/Shell/Registercommand]
@="regsvr32.exe "%1""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/dllfile/Shell/UnRegistercommand]
@="regsvr32.exe /u "%1""

Often times, for me at least, I have to launch a process which consumes a lot of processing power, such as archiving a large database or compressing a large file. These processes use so much of your CPU that your computer is practically unusable until it is done (if you have a single core processor). Simply change the priority this process has by doing the following:

1. Enter "taskmgr" in your Run dialog
2. Select Processes
3. Right click on the greedy process
4. Set Priority to BelowNormal or Low

Since pretty much any process you launch normally will run will with normal priority, they will get the CPU first and your greedy applications will get what is left over.

A very handy utility to have when you are troubleshooting is an application called FileMon by SysInternals. This application monitors all (and I mean all) disk I/O on your computer and can help you easily diagnose if a certain process does not have access to a certain file. Once launched your screen will almost immediately be filled with activity, but fear not; there are filtering capabilities so you can quickly find what you are looking for.

Download it here: www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html

Probably you haven't noticed that Windows Explorer shows the size of files but not that of folders. This might be OK for you now, but not after you have tried a small shell extension called Folder Size (http://foldersize.sourceforge.net). This small piece of code adds a new column (Folder Size) in Details view of Windows Explorer.

The folder size extension comes very handy when, for example, you are looking for a folder that will fit on CD. It can be also useful when you need to clean your harddrive of big old files, or you are looking for a large file you know you have saved somewhere on disk but have no idea where, because just having a glance at the size of the folders on your hard drive, will give you a clue which folders are bigger to start the search from them.

Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT).

1)Open HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\ RunMRU\.

2)Delete all of the values that you don’t want in this key (everything in the right pane, except for (Default)).

3) Close the Registry Editor when finished. You'll probably have to refresh the Desktop or restart Windows for this change to take effect.

In regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Regedit

Look for the value LastKey. Double-click it and clear the string. Then right-click the Regedit key (in the left hand pane) and select Permissions. Set Permissions to Deny for any/all users/groups.

The following will show you how to use the Iexpress2.0 tool.

The tool allows you to make a self extracting file and much more: To play with this hidden feature of XP:

Navigate to: Windows\system32\

Look for a file called iexpress.exe.

Double left click on it and follow the wizard.

While viewing Windows Explorer, you pop out one cd and insert another. Sometimes the cd drive information doesn't update. This little reg tweak can help out. It also speeds up overall viewing in Explorer.

Change the value of UpdateMode in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Update from 01 to 00.

Of course you know XP has some pretty attractive user interface features. A few of these being scrolling menus, shadowed cursors, and displaying folder contents while repositioning. What you may not know is that these require processor power and utilize some of your system or graphic memory.

On older machines you may notice an increase in your system performance by disabling some of these features. You can easily enable or disable features by going to the following location:

Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance

Clicking Adjust For Best Performance will disable everything, including the default XP window theme. Find the setting which works best for you and you will probably notice a slight increase in performance for your everyday use.

This installment of "The Baker's Dozen" presents a variety of tips and techniques to become productive with data handling techniques using ADO.NET 2.0 in Visual Studio 2005.

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