Posts Tagged ‘XP’
Disable Balloon Tips on Windows
Who is not annoyed by the approximately thousand balloon tips popping up on every boot of the Windows XP system telling you what is not alright with your computer. But fear not, as for nearly all problems, there is also a solution for this one, although you have to venture deep down into your Windows registry!
Before you start, notice that balloon tips may display important messages you would not want to miss. Follow this guide only if you are aware of the consequences and are able to keep your system in shape yourself!
To open the registry, open start > Run… and enter regedit. You will be shown a window parted into two frames, one on the left, displaying a whole lot of folders and one on the right, displaying the folders’ contents.
To disable the balloon tips, browse the folders on the left to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer > Advanced. Now rightclick on any free space on the right frame and select New > DWORD Value. Name the new key EnableBalloonTips. After that, rightclick it and select Modify. In the opened window, change the value from 1 to 0 and make sure that Hexadecimal is checked as Base. Now close the registry and reboot your machine. If you have done all accordingly to this article you will be shown no balloon tips anymore.
Create System Restore Points in Win XP automatically
Since older system restore points are deleted after some time, it is always good to create some new regularly. But to always have to browse through the countless menus day by day can be really annoying, that is why we will use Windows’ Notepad and Scheduled Tasks functions to ease our lives.
First we create a short script that creates system restore points in our notepad, therefore open one and type in these two lines:
Set auto_rp = getobject(“winmgmts:\\.\root\default:Systemrestore”)
auto_sys_rp = auto_rp.createrestorepoint (“Automatic System Restore Point”, 0, 100)
When saving, make sure to not save it as text document but select All Files from the Save as type dropdown menu and name it something like automatic_sysrp.vbs. vbs is the type of file here, make sure you have it correct, since otherwise the script will not be executable.
Now that you have created the script, you can doubleclick it to create a system restore point. But to have it done automatically, we are going to use Windows’ Scheduled Tasks function. Therefore, enter Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Scheduled Tasks. Select File > New > Scheduled Task from the control bar. Give it a name, rightclick it and select Properties.
In the opened window, browse the location of the vbs script you just created and go to the Schedule tab. Enter a time when the restore point shall be created and click on Apply when you are finished. A new system restore point will now be created at the time you specified or on doubleclick upon the script.
How to get a list of all open ports on Windows 7, Vista and XP?
There is a small freeware Utility called CurrPorts from Nirsoft that displays all open ports on windows.
Download CurrPorts to your computer:
32Bit version: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.zip
64Bit version: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports-x64.zip
Unpack the .zip file and double click on the file cports.exe to start CurrPorts. The application will show you a list of all open ports and offers the ability to apply filters on the list.
Shutdown Windows XP immediately
If you shutdown windows XP with the button in the start menu, it often takes minutes until the computer is finally stopped as Windows runs several tasks before it shuts down the computer. If you need to shutdown the computer immediately, you can use this command:
C:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 00
How to prevent the automatic restart after a Windows update?
One solution is to stop the windows update service to prevent that Windows XP restarts the computer after an update. The update service will be started again after the next boot.
Click on “Start” > “Run” and enter the command:
net stop wuauserv
How to access a namebased website without a DNS record
If you want to access a namebased website that you created e.g. in ISPConfig before the DNS records are setup, edit the hosts file on your workstation computer and add a line like this:
192.168.0.100 www.mydomain.com
Replace the IP address with the IP of your server and www.mydomain.com with the domain name of the website.
The hosts file on linux and MAC systems is /etc/hosts, on Windows systems the hosts file is C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
The above trick also works if you want to run a website in your internal network (intranet) without having a DNS server availalble for local dns resolving.
Windows starts slower after defragmenting the harddisk
If your windows installation starts slower after you defragmeted the harddisk, it might be nescessary to run the defragmentation utility on the boot files too which were normally skipped when running the defrag utility. To defragment the boot files, click on “Start” > “Run…” and then enter the command “defrag -b :c”:
Clear the Windows XP system file cache in to get more free space on the harddisk
Windows XP makes backup copies of your system files which may use a lot of space on your harddisk. To empty the system file cache, click on Start > run… Now enter the command “sfc /purgecache” and click on “Ok”.
