Number 248 - January 2004

Windows XP Hints & Tips
by Bill Beverley, From PC Alamode, June 2003, Alamo PC Organization
Firewall    WinXP comes with a built-in firewall. To install it, open the Start menu, right-click on My Network Places, and choose Properties. Right-click on the connection you want to protect, and choose Properties. If using a dial-up account, you right-click on that icon. If using a network in your home or office, you right-click on the Local Area Connection. Either way, choose Properties and click the Advanced tab. Click the box to activate the WinXP firewall. If you're using a network and one computer acts as the gateway, the firewall should be activated only on the host computer that's actually connected to the Internet. It doesn't need to be activated on the client computers that share the host computer's modem. Media Player    Most people want to play music when they open WinXP Media Player. But it often is set to open at the "Media Guide." If that is your problem, begin by clicking Start, All Programs, Accessories, Entertainment, and Windows Media Player. Then click Tools, Options, the Player tab and deselect "Start player in Media Guide." Finally, click Apply and OK. The program should start in "Now Playing" mode. You can also use Windows Media Player to record and organize music as well as to play your favorite tunes. WinXP Media Player makes it easy to copy music from audio CDs or from the Internet radio stations. You can then organize the music copied onto the hard drive into play lists. They can be played in Windows Media Player or copied onto portable devices, such as a portable MP3 player. If your computer has a CD-R (CD recordable) or CD-RW (CD re-writable) drive, you can even copy the music files onto blank formatted CDs. You view Windows Media Player in one of two modes: full mode (Ctrl+1) and compact mode (Ctrl+2). Full mode is the default. Mouse Pointer    Frequently, the mouse pointer obscures parts of an online form or document. Whenever this happens you must reach for the mouse to move the pointer. To solve this problem, you can instruct WinXP to make the pointer go away whenever typing a document by clicking Start, Control Panel, Printers and Other Hardware, then Mouse. In the Mouse Properties dialog box, select the Pointer Options tab. Under Visibility, check the "Hide Pointer While Typing" checkbox, click Apply followed by OK. My Documents    To remove the My Documents folder from the desktop because it's too easy for people to snoop your documents, you will need to right-click the desktop. Click Properties, select the Desktop tab, click Customize Desktop, deselect My Documents, and click OK. You now have only deleted the desktop link to the folder. The My Documents folder is still accessible in Windows Explorer and off the Start button. New User Accounts    To set up a new user account, log in to your administrator account, click Start, Control Panel, and User Accounts. You will now be asked to choose a task such as changing accounts, adding new ones, or changing log-on/log-off options. Click Create a New Account. The most common identification method is to name user accounts after the people who will use them. Now click the Next button, choose the type of account, and conclude by clicking Create Account. Online Icon    To put the Network Status icon in your System Tray, click Start and select My Computer. You can right-click it to find your Internet Service Provider (ISP) connection's speed, and to close the connection. It's easy enough to find in WinXP. In the Other Places menu, click "My Network Places." In the Network Tasks menu, click "View Network Connections." Next you should right-click the icon of the ISP connection or network and select Properties. On the General tab, check the box for "Show icon in notification area when connected" and click OK. Password    If you forget your password, WinXP lets users create a password reset disk. To create this disk, insert a floppy disk into your drive, open "User Accounts" in the Control Panel, and double-click on your account name. On the left side of the window, under Related Tasks, select "Prevent a forgotten password." A wizard will pop up and walk you through the process of creating the password recovery disk. If you try several times to log on using the wrong password, will prompt you to insert the password reset disk and will then use it for authentication. You can log in to the system, but you'll have to select a new password. The floppy disk will be updated to reflect your new password. Performance Enhancements    There are several ways to tune XP's visual performance. One is to adjust the color depth by right-clicking anywhere on an empty portion of your desktop and selecting "Properties and Settings." For most normal business users, the Color Quality setting should be set to Medium. Higher settings only matter in photo/ video editing and similar applications but not for Web browsing, e-mail, and word processing. Another suggestion is to adjust XP's desktop animations and visual effects by right-clicking on My Computer, selecting "Properties, Advanced, and Performance Settings." You can choose to activate/ deactivate individual items or use the general "best performance/best appearance" buttons. When you've made a change, click Apply, and you'll see the effects. A third idea is to customize the Taskbar by right-clicking on an empty spot in the Taskbar and un-checking the "Lock the	Taskbar." You can now resize various portions of the Taskbar to your preferences. A fourth trick is to control your trash in the Recycle Bin and Internet Explorer's (IE) cache, both of which consume large amounts of your hard drive space. Right-click on the Recycle Bin, select Properties, and on the Global tab, decide how much space you want the Recycle Bin to consume, either for all drives in your system, or on a per-drive basis. Similarly, open IE and select "Tools and Internet Options." Under Temporary Internet Files, click the Settings button and select a reasonable size for this cache, such as 5-10 megabytes. Personal Folders    The My Pictures and My Music folders offer several specialized options that you can select to work with your pictures and music. My Pictures - view as a slide show; display all the pictures in the My Pictures folder as a full-screen slide show; order prints online; and send the pictures selected to a Web site that allows you to order prints of the pictures. My Music-play all the music in the My Music folder; shop for music online; and display the WindowsMedia.com Web site, which allows you to listen to and purchase music. Power Tools    Microsoft has provided a few add-ons for its operating systems (OS) in the form of PowerToys or Tools. To view the list of these Power Tools, see Microsoft's PowerToys Download page . At this site you'll see short descriptions of each Power Tool and download links on the right side of the screen. Click the link for the Power Tool you want and save the file to a location that's easy to remember on your computer's hard drive. After you download the file, double-click it to start the installation process and then follow the on-screen instructions to install your new tool(s). Once the installation is complete, click Start, All Programs, and PowerToys for WinXP You will now see a list of a few PowerToys installed on your computer. Although these Power Tools were created to work smoothly with WinXP, they are not actually a part of the OS. If you have any older PowerToys/Tools installed on your system, remove them using the Add/Remove Program icon in the Control Panel before updating to these new versions. Be sure, too, that your WinXP Taskbar isn't locked before installing and using the Power Tools. Do this task by right-clicking the Taskbar. Some of these Power Tools include: Tweak Ul, PowerToy Calculator, Alt-Tab Replacement, Virtual Desktop Manager, HTML Slide Show Wizard, CD Slide Show Generator, Taskbar Magnifier, Image Resizer, Webcom TimerShot, and Open Command Window Here. Privacy Reports    Internet Explorer (IE) 6, which comes with WinXP, includes a new tool that tells you about the cookie settings for a particular Web site and how the site measures up against your cookie settings. For example, if your cookie settings prohibit third-party cookies, the report tells you about any violation attempted by that site. You can easily get this Privacy Report by accessing the desired Web site using IE, and then choosing "View and Privacy Report." A single window appears, based on the page and linked information. You see a note at the top of the page indicating if any cookies were restricted or blocked by the settings. Program Installation and Removal    Installing and removing programs is generally easy in WinXP. Here's a quick lineup of the various ways you can install and uninstall programs. To install a program that was delivered to you on a CD, place the CD in your CD-ROM drive and wait a few seconds for installation instructions to appear onscreen. If the CD doesn't display installation instructions automatically, use the same procedure to install a program from a floppy disk. To install a program from a floppy disk, click the Start button, choose Control Panel, and open the Add or Remove Programs icon. Then click the Add New Programs option in the left pane of the dialog box that opens at this time. To install a program you downloaded from the Internet, just click (or double-click) its icon, and follow the instructions that appear onscreen. To install missing Windows components, or remove installed components, open the Add or Remove Programs icon in Control Panel. Then click the "Add/Remove Windows Components" option in the left pane. To remove an installed program, click the name of the program you want to remove in the Add or Remove Programs dialog box. Then click the program you want to remove, and click the Change/Remove button that appears. To install OpenType, TrueType, Type l, and Raster Fonts, open the Fonts icon in Control Panel, and choose File, Install New Font from its menu bar. Reinstallation    If you reinstall WinXP it must be reactivated. However, there's a way around this reactivation. WinXP maintains the activation information in the file Wpa.dbl, which you'll find in the Windows\System32 folder. After you activate WinXP and any time hardware is added to your system, backup the file to another disk. If you need to reinstall WinXP for any reason, go through the installation routine and then copy the latest version of Wpa.dbl to the Windows\System32 folder. WinXP Home Edition has been a headache for many college students who arrived at school with their new notebooks and needed to connect to a campus network. Most of their notebooks came with WinXP Home preinstalled on them. To the surprise of these students many colleges do not run Windows servers and those that do can host Home in only a limited way. Unlike WinXP Professional Edition, WinXP Home does not support multiple processors. You should keep these version differences in mind not only for college but also for business use.    Bill Beverley is retired military and an intermediate computer enthusiast.
Number 248 - January 2004