Some Nice Tweaks

I thought I'd share two tweaks with everyone that I find useful. The first most of you might already know. The second one I find VERY useful. I know the system tray is customizable so you can always hide/show a certain icon when you want, but sometimes that list is full of crap that isn't on your computer anymore or you've disabled the system tray feature for it yet it still shows up in the list. This tweak will clear the whole list and then rebuild it with what is currently in your system tray, cleaning out all of the miscellaneous crap. (It took me FOREVER to find this tweak, and I have never seen it listed anywhere but on Microsoft's site)

1) Enabling ClearType on the Welcome Screen

Start regedit

Navigate to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop.

Locate the key FontSmoothingType.

Change the value to 2.

Restart.

2) Clear the Past Items list in system tray Customize Notifications window

Delete the IconStreams and PastIconsStream values from the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify

Open Task Manager, click the Processes tab, click Explorer.exe, and then click End Process.

In Task Manager, click File, click New Task, type explorer, and then click OK

If anyone else has some GOOD tweaks that help clean up/improve your machine, use this thread to post them.

#13607

Thanx man

#13611

Ok if we are dealing out XP tips..

For faster boottime on laptops and some desktops.

Device Manager,.. IDE ATA controllers.

For both Primary and Secondary, there are 2 devices each. Device 0 and Device 1.

The Usual setup is this

Primary Device 0 = Harddisk (Autodetect greyed out)

Primary Device 1 = Empty (Autodetect)

Secondary Device 0 = CDROM/Floppy/Whatever (Autodetect greyed out)

Secondary Device 1 = Empty (Autodetect)

For devices that are in use you cannot change the autodetect

(it is greyed out).

What you should do is... for the other devices (Device 1's) change "autodetect" to "none".

This will shave seconds off your boottime because XP is not waiting for the autodetect to finish timing out, because it is trying to detect something that is not there.

Don't worry if you messit up,.. in the unlikely event that you boot up and find your superdeluxe 72x DVD-RW not working, just change it back and experiment. So be sure to write down the original value.

Tip No2.

Turn off error reporting (right click my comp), but notify when errors occur.

Tip No3.

Right click My comp. "Manage"--> "Event viewer"---> clear those damn logs.

Tip No4

Do a search (including hidden & system files) for

*.tmp, *.gid, *.fts and delete all these files. Do not delete *.old, *.ago, *.bak files in XP system folders, just use the disk cleanup utility.

Tip No5.

Run---> "Msconfig" last tab---> clear everything that you do not need. How do you decide? Realplayer, ICQ, and all that stuff just take up resources,.. you decide. My advice to you is this. Write down what is there. Uncheck everything----> reboot. In 80 percent of cases your system will be perfect.

If you find something that doesn't work,.. go back check that ONE value then reboot.

As an example my XP,.. after boot, task manager shows a PF usage of 95mb only. Before I did the aquafying system dll's etc, it only showed 55MB. that was a record low. Why? because I keep the system clean using this method.

Tip No6.

When watching DIVX or DVD or even VCD's in WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER WMP,... goto tools --> performance---> advanced,.. and turn off "overlays",... --->bask at the increased tonal and colour quality. I don't know why people still use overlays.

Tip No 7.

In start menu make sure OD loads before Y's shadow. AND make sure OD is one of the programs that is on Y's Shadow exception list. (5 fps increase in OD)

Tip no 8.

pay your taxes

#13631

Thanks alot flyakite, that tip about clearing past tray items is good, all that hullabaloo in there was pissing me off but bam its outta there..

#13642