Here is a little trick that you can do to change the screen orientation in Windows XP.

Hold down the Ctrl + Alt keys and press any of the arrow keys. The screen will re-orient to match the arrow key that you pressed as shown in the image below.

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Microsoft Windows Explorer, which is accessible through the Start menu, is the tool you use to look through the files and drives on your computer.

When you start Windows Explorer from the Start menu, it opens your My Documents folder by default. However, a My Documents shortcut already exists on your Start menu. You can put the Windows Explorer shortcut to better use by changing it to display all top-level drives and folders on your system. This change will give you a broad, overall view of all your folders and files.  Read the full story

One of the unfortunate side effects of the Windows welcome screen is the listing of all the user accounts on the computer. What if there is an account that you do not want others to see? Using the same feature that Microsoft uses to hide system accounts from the Welcome screen, you can hide user accounts as well.

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Depending on your XP configuration and the programs you’ve installed, your Registry may have thousands of settings or tens of thousands of them. The settings are organized into five main Registry sections, called Registry hives. In the Registry the hives simply appear as folders.

Here’s what each Registry hive does: Read the full story

Windows Indexing Service creates indexes of the contents and properties of all files on local and network drives in order to increase file searching speed. But the downside is that your PC’s general performance will slow down because it has to index files continuously. So if you are not very particular about the slight increase in search speed or if you use a third party search engine like the Google Desktop Search or Copernic, then you can safely disable the indexing service. There are more than one ways of doing that.

One way is to disable it at the drive level. To disable it for a particular drive, open My Computer -> right-click on a Drive icon -> Select Properties -> Remove the checkmark from “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching” -> Click Apply. Make sure to select “Apply changes to :\, subfolders and files.” before clicking OK in the new window.

Another way is to disable the service totally. To do that navigate to: Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services and stop the service.

If you are sure that you would not be using the Indexing Services at all, then you might consider uninstalling it from your system. To do that go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. Click the Add/Remove Window Components and Uncheck Indexing Services.

Note: Indexing Service is turned on by default for all NTFS partitions.

If your computer has an NTFS partition, then there is a neat little trick to hide any file inside any other file. Unfortunately, this trick does not work on FAT32 formatted drive.

As an example let’s see how you can hide the solitaire file (sol.exe) inside a text file.

Let’s start by assuming that you are currently working on the C: drive. Create a folder and name it ‘Hide’ (of course, you could name it anything you want). Now create a text file inside the folder and enter a few lines of text. Let’s call it ‘container.txt’. As the name indicates, this text file will act as the container file. For this example, we will hide the Solitaire game file inside the text file. You will find the Solitaire file at C:\Windows\System32\sol.exe. Copy this file into the ‘Hide’ folder. Read the full story

System Restore is one of the best features introduced in Windows XP. Sometimes your computer may behave strangely after you install a new application. Even uninstalling the application may not bring your computer back to normal. However, if you know how to use System Restore, you can bring your computer back to the original state it was in, before you installed the application. Read the full story