Saturday, March 7, 2009

Stop Noise

When using 3rd party burning software (eg, Nero Burning Rom) to copy audio
CD,some noise may be heard at the end of each track. To prevent this,try the
following method:
1. Enter System Properties\device manager
2. Select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
3. Double click on thee CD writer IDE channel
4. Select advance setting
5. Change the transfer mode to 'PIO Only'
6. Restart Computer

Automatically Killing Tasks on Shutdown

You know the drill. You start to shut down the computer, you wait a few moments,
and then you see a dialog box asking if you want to kill an application or service that
is running. Instead of prompting you, you can make Windows XP take care of the kill
task automatically. Here's how:
1. Open the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Highlight the value AutoEndTasks and change the value to 1.
4. Close the Registry Editor.

Speeding Up the Dual-Boot Timeout

If you dual-boot your computer with Windows XP and another operating system, you
see an operating system selection menu on startup. If you typically boot into Windows
XP and not the other operating system, you can speed up the dual-boot timeout value
so that you do not wait so long for the boot process to select your default operating
system and continue with the boot process. The default timeout value is 30 seconds
but you can change this setting to 10. This gives you enough time to select the
alternate operating system if you want but also speeds up the boot process. You can skip this section if you do not use a dual-boot configuration.

Follow these steps:
1. Locate the boot.ini file on your computer. It is a hidden file by default; mine is
located in C:\boot.ini.
2. Open the file with Notepad (which is what opens it by default).
3. Change the Timeout value to 10.
4. Select File/Save and close Notepad.

Disabling the Boot Logo .

You can remove the boot logo that appears when you start Windows XP. This little
tweak probably shaves only a few seconds off your boot time but seconds count if you
are serious about trying to get Windows XP up and running as quickly as possible.
The only negative is that if you remove the boot logo, you will also not see any boot
messages, such as check disk.
To remove the boot logo, follow these steps:
1. Select Start/Run, type msconfig, and click OK.
2. In the System Configuration Utility, click the BOOT.INI tab.
3. On the BOOT.INI tab, click the NOGUIBOOT check box option. Click OK.

Stop Error Messages from Displaying on Startup .

If you constantly see an error message that you can't get rid offor example, from a
piece of software that didn't uninstall properly and continues to give errors on
startupyou can disable it from displaying on startup. Run the Registry Editor and go to
HKEY_LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows. (This
key holds a variety of Windows system settings, such as the location of your system
directory.) Create a new DWORD called NoPopupsOnBoot and give it a value of 1.
Exit the Registry and reboot for the setting to take effect. To disable it, either delete
the DWORD value or give it a value of 0.