Increase Your Cable Modem or DSL Speed in XP

This tweak is for broad band cable connections on stand alone machines with WinXP professional version - might work on Home version also.

It may also work with networked machines as well. This tweak assumes that you have let WinXP create a connection on install for your cable modem/NIC combination and that your connection has tcp/ip - QoS - file and print sharing - and client for Microsoft networks , only, installed.

It also assumes that WinXP will detect your NIC and has in-box drivers for it. If it doesn't do not try this.

• In the "My Network Places" properties (right-click on the desktop icon and choose properties), highlight the connection then at the menu bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings".
Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.

• From the Windows XP CD in the support directory from the support cab, extract the file netcap.exe and place it in a directory on your hard drive or even in the root of your C:\ drive.

• Next, open up a command prompt window and change directories to where you put netcap.exe. then type "netcap/?".
It will list some commands that are available for netcap and a netmon driver will be installed. At the bottom you will see your adapters.
You should see two of them if using a 3Com card. One will be for LAN and the other will be for WAN something or other.

• Next type "netcap/Remove". This will remove the netmon driver.

• Open up Control Panel->System->Dev Man and look at your network adapters. You should now see two of them and one will have a yellow ! on it. Right-click on the one without the yellow ! and choose uninstall. YES! You are uninstalling your network adapter, continue with the uninstall. Do not restart yet.

• Check your connection properties to make sure that no connection exists. If you get a wizard just cancel out of it. Now re-start the machine.

• After re-start go to your connection properties again and you should have a new connection called "Local area connection 2". Highlight the connection, then at the menu bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings". Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.

• Choose connection properties and uncheck the "QOS" box.

• Re-start the machine.

After restart enjoy the increased responsiveness of IE, faster page loading, and a connection speed boost.

Why it works, it seems that windows XP, in its zeal to make sure every base is covered installs two separate versions of the NIC card. One you do not normally see in any properties.
Remember the "netcap/?" command above showing two different adapters? The LAN one is the one you see. The invisible one loads everything down and its like your running two separate cards together, sharing a connection among two cards, this method breaks this "bond" and allows the NIC to run un-hindered.

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Turn Off CD Auto Play

• Open My Computer.

• Right-click on your CD-ROM and choose Properties.

• Click on the Auto Play tab.

• In the drop down box you can choose the action for each choice shown in the drop down box.

• or Go to Start > Run > type gpedit.msc

• Go to Computer Config > Administrative Template > System.

• Double-click Turn off Autoplay.

• Enable it.

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You Can Bypass the Recycle Bin On the Fly.

To bypass the Recycle Bin on a one-time basis, when you are deleting a file (or a group of selected files):

• Press and hold down the shift-key while you press the del-key (or use the delete command).
You receive the following confirmation-request message: Are you sure you want to send to the Recycle Bin?

Click ok and you are done.
File will be deleted permanently.

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Do Not Highlight Newly Installed Programs

Tired of that annoying little window that pops up to tell you that new software is installed? If it gets in the way when you’re logging off, turn it off completely.

To do this:

• Click Start, right-click at the top of the Start menu where your name is displayed, and then click Properties.

• In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box, on the Start Menu tab, click Customize.

• Click the Advanced tab, and then clear the Highlight newly installed programs check box.

• Click OK, and then click OK again.

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How to Change Drive Letters in Windows XP

When you add drives to your computer, such as an extra hard drive, a CD drive, or a storage device that corresponds to a drive, Windows automatically assigns letters to the drives.

However, this assignment might not suit your system; for example, you might have mapped a network drive to the same letter that Windows assigns to a new drive.

When you want to change drive letters,

Follow these steps:
• Right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.

• Under Computer Management, click Disk Management. In the right pane, you’ll see your drives listed. CD-ROM drives are listed at the bottom of the pane.

• Right-click the drive or device you want to change, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

• Click Change, click Assign the following drive letter, click the drive letter you want to assign, and then click OK.

Enjoy

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Load Internet Explorer the Fast, Auto Logon, Remove Messenger Trick

Load Internet Explorer the Fastest Way Possible

• Edit your link to start Internet Explorer to have -nohome after it. For Example: "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" -nohome

This will load internet explorer very fast because it does not load a web page while it is loading.
If you want to go to your homepage after it is loaded, just click on the home button.

Remove Messenger

• Go to Start/Run, and type: "rundll32 setupapi,InstallHinfSection BLC.Remove 128 %SystemRoot%\INF\msmsgs.inf"

Auto Login
• Go to Start/Run, and type 'control userpasswords2'.

• From Users Tab, Uncheck "Users must enter ...."

• A dialog will allow setting a user and password to be used automatically.

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Performance Increase Through My Computer

Easy enough tweak to usually find out about it on your own, but still, some of us still don't find it right away.

So here it is:

• Start > right-click on My Computer and select Properties.

• Click on the "Advanced" tab.

• See the "Performance" section? Click "Settings".

• Disable the following:
Fade or slide menus into view
Fade or slide ToolTips into view
Fade out menu items after clicking
Show Shadows under menus
Slide open combo boxes
Slide taskbar buttons
Use a background image for each folder type
Use common tasks in folders

There, now Windows will still look nice and perform faster.

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How to Remove Hibernation File

If you do not use hibernation, make sure you do not have it enabled, which reserves disk space equal to your RAM.

If you have a hidden file on the root directory of your C-drive called hiberfil.sys, hibernation is enabled.

To remove that file:

• Go to Control Panel, select Performance and Maintenance, Power Options, Hibernate tab, and uncheck the Enable hibernation box.

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Clean Your Prefetch to Improve Performance of system

This is a unique technique for Windows XP.
We know that it is necessary to scrub registry and TEMP files for Win9X/ME/2000 periodically. Prefetch is a new and very useful technique in Windows XP.
However, after using XP some time, the prefetch directory can get full of junk and obsolete links in the Prefetch catalog, which can slow down your computer noticeably.

• Open C(system drive):/windows/prefetch, delete those junk and obsolete files, reboot. It is recommended that you do this every month.

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Turn Off Indexing to Speed Up XP

Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk so when you do a search on the hard drive it is faster.
There is a downside to this and because the computer has to index all files, it will slow down normal file commands like open, close, etc.
If you do not do a whole lot of searches on your hard drive then you may want to turn this feature off:

• Open My Computer.

• Right-click your hard drive icon and select Properties.

• At the bottom of the window you'll see "Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches," uncheck this and click ok.

• A new window will pop up and select Apply to all folders and subfolders.
It will take a minute or two for the changes to take affect but then you should enjoy slightly faster performance.

Enjoy @hacksandtrickz.

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