How to tweak windows?

In this article, we will have a look at some tweaks within Windows. These tweaks work with all Windows Operating systems, 95/98/ME/2000 and XP. A lot can be changed or improved through the use of tweaks, all depending on what you do. Now, let’s get to tweaking.

Tweaking msconfig

Most of you out there are already familiar with msconfig, which is basically a built in system configuration utility for Windows. You can open it up by simply clicking Start then Run, typing ‘msconfig’ in the box, and then press enter. The tab that we are going to look at is the Startup tab. When you locate it, click on it.

This box will display all of the programs that are started when Windows boots up. None of these programs are vital to Windows, so don’t worry about removing some of them when you experiment. If you’ve unchecked some of the boxes, Windows should start up faster and will take less resources by not running the checked programs in the background.

Speeding up Internet Explorer

This is a very nifty trick that you can use with Internet Explorer to make it boot up extremely fast. Simply right click on a shortcut to Internet Explorer and add the parameter ‘-nohome’ to the end of the command line. This will speed up IE a great deal, loading it almost instantly on some systems.

Increase options in Add/Remove programs

Are you not a fan of Windows messenger or simply don’t want Windows Media Player on your system? If you go to Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, you will notice that none of XP’s built in programs are visible by default. On the other hand, it is fairly easy to change. Open the file Z:\Windows\inf\sysoc.inf (replace the Z with the letter of the drive where Windows XP is installed) in notepad.

You will see a list of all components that you installed at the moment. If you see the word ‘hide’ beside of an entry, it means that the string is telling Windows not to display the component in the Add/Remove Programs list. You can fix this by simply deleting the word ‘hide’.

After restarting, you should be able to see the program you removed the ‘hide’ from in the Add/Remove Programs list. If you want to quickly view and remove all components, simply open the sysoc.inf file and do a global find then replace the word “,hide” with a single comma, so it looks like “,"