Options

Customizing In XP

The System Properties Dialog has a surprising number of configuration options. All you have to do is spend some time drilling down through the buttons and tabs to figure out what gold can be found in those hidden crevices. For instance, Windows XP is very heavy on the visual effects. So much so in fact that it can bring previous generations of video cards to their knees because they cannot handle all of the fancy alpha channel information in hardware. Luckily, XP gives you a quick and easy way to toggle your system between looking good and working fast. The image below-left shows this configuration screen, and even gives you the option of picking and choosing what features you want to turn on or deactivate. Wish all of Windows XP was this accommodating.

Visual Effects

Virtual Advances

Startup And Recovery

The screen above-center shows another area of performance that users can tweak. If you ever wondered why XP takes so much disk space, you can clearly see that a good chunk, in this case some 768 meg, is devoted to a swap file. Best not tweak things too much unless you really know your stuff, but again, it is nice to have the option. Lastly, above-right, there is a screen for tweaking Startup and Recovery options. Personally, I hate waiting 30 seconds for XP to get going, so I lower it down to 10, 5 or even 1 second so that it boots up even faster. Also, if things are going nuclear on your system and XP just won't behave, you can adjust the error reporting so it is more verbose.

Group Rename - Step One

Group Rename - Step Two

Group Rename - Step Three

Another item in XP that I'm pretty happy about is the group renaming feature. Back in the DOS days, we could do that via batch files or the command line, but Windows never seemed to be comfortable giving us that much control. Maybe Microsoft thought we would just mess things up if we had the power to rename batches of files again, but whatever the case, it was a sorely missed feature. To perform the renaming miracle, group select the files you wish to rename, press the F2 key to rename the first item in the list and then press the Enter key. This process is shown in the above-left, above-center and above-right screen shots. The end result may seem a bit rudimentary at best, but hey, Microsoft rarely gets things right the very first time they do something.