Widow

Simple Tweak for showing the Administrative Tools only on the Places menu. Here,s I quick tip for the XP start menu that I found while rummaging around in the registry. Did you notice how under the Customize Start Menu->Advanced->System Administrative Tools you can set it for one of three ways: Display On all Programs Menu (Don't Like it there) Display On All Prorgams Menu And Start Menu (Better but now its in two Places) Don't Display this Item All three choices are unacceptable, I want the Administrative Tools On the start Menu only. Here's how... Under Customize Start Menu->Advanced->System Administrative Tools Now choose - Don't Display this Item. Now use regedit and go here... [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "Start_AdminToolsRoot"=dword:00000001 Change Start_AdminToolsRoot from 0 to 1, reboot the system and your set....now the Administrative Tools only displays on the Start Menu and not on the All Programs Menu.....

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Those are all good sites but the one I posted is the granddaddy of them all, it has 10 times what any of the others have.... I am in full retro mode playing some of the best rpgs ever made.....

Hi all, just wanted to share this. I found a site on the net that has an excellent collection of older games. These are games that have either been released as freeware or are now released to the public as free domain games. There are some games on the site(newer ones) that can be purchased, so I believe the site is legit.(At least there was no mention of W***Z or anything of that sort, Anyway I have found a lot of great older games(now freeware) like Betrayal at Krondor, Eye of the Beholder and such; older games for sure but even though the graphics suffered back then the story lines seemed more indepth. One thing about the site is that they do not allow more than one download at a time, if you try to you will be banned for and hour or so. Check it out and let me know what you think......Old gamers Rule!!!..hehe.. http://www.theunderdogs.org

Just wanted to share my experience with setting up a dual booting system. Windows 2000/Windows 98. I have been running windows 2000 for well over a year and really like it; but I do miss being able to play some older games now and then. I tried setting up a dual boot system a while back using a guide I found on one of the major tweak sites and it was nothing short of a disaster. Well since then I have found an easier way for those of us who want the best of both worlds but don't want to be spending an eternity trying to make it work. 1. First off make sure that if your hard drives are partitioned they are partitioned so that the space you plan on using for windows 98 is a primary partition and not an extended partition. This can be easily found out through the windows 2000 computer management console. Once your partition is ready just format it to fat32. (Actually with windows 2000 its a good idea to make all partitions primary and get away from using extended partitions all together) 2. You will need to have a windows 98 boot disk handy with system files and the sys.com file on it. If you don't have one any longer go here to get one: http://www.bootdisk.com/ 3. You will need to download some time of boot manager; there are many, I personnaly use Bootstar Bootmanager(its a great little $20 program, takes almost no thought to use...which is good for me.) http://www.star-tools.com/ There are many others including some freeware ones, just remember you always get what you pay for! 4. After you have make you 98 boot disk and installed your boot manager you can reboot your system to the 98 boot disk. The boot disk will only recognize the fat32 partition you created so all you need to do is to transfer the system to C: 5. After the system is transferred just set up 98 as usual. Note: At least when using Bootstar the inital boot screen did not come up after I installed 98 and I had to use the rescue disk one time to fix it. After that upon every boot up it pops up a boot menu for you to choose from. 6. All in all it was very simple to do. A couple of quick notes for anyone wanting to try this. 1. Remember windows 98 cannot see NTFS partitions so if you need some files that are on your win2k partitions you will need to copy them to the win98 partition while in windows 2k. 2. If you install norton utilites for windows 98 DO NOT under any circumstances use disk doctor to repair partitions(disk doctor likes to pop up a windows and ask you if you are having trouble accessing other partitions) as long as you always answer no to this you should be fine, speedisk and all other norton utilities work as normal. Now all those old games I have lying around are getting played again, it has really worked out well and now I have the best of both worlds. Btw: Total time to set up and install windows 98 with a dual boot was just under an hour.

Interesting. I have tried this on 2 seperate systems and it does seem to make the system snappier. The intersting thing is when I did a search of microsofts technet for infor about it I got nothing but a cryptic message at best; somthing to the effect of these options are not listed as they should not be changed by the user. Makes me wonder what other unknown settings aren't listed in Microsofts tech papers....anyway great tip...thanks...

Thanks for the info Dr Pizza. Most of the services I knew about although I am by no means an expert. (more like a tinkerer with a penchant for tinkering too much and crashing things once in a while) Though I didn't realize that Distributed Link Tracking Client client only functions within a domain. I have learned not to be overly aggressive when turning things off, even though you should be able too. I tend to install and remove lots of apps(part of that tinkering thing again) to see what they do and if they are worth using. It seems that if you using adequate memory(256meg or more) you can probably leave most things as Win2k sets them without much worry.(though I would still turn off Messenger, RunAs Service, and Remote Registry Service for security reasons and that I would never use them) The most benifit of really shutting things down that I can see is if you are running 128meg or less and trying to run win2k; then shutting down every possible service would make sense as you would save a bit of memory and save on some system threads being used. Anyway I appreciate everyones input it was informative and interesting.

I tend to keep runing the following services: a few I could probably live without, but then I have memory to spare. COM+ Event System (Pretty much essential) Distributed Link Tracking Client(Can be turned off but the way I move stuff around on my drives its safer for me to leave this on) DNS Client (Pretty much essential) Event Log (Not essential but great for troubleshooting) Logical Disk Manager (Not essential, but I have many partitions and turning this off seems the precipitate the system wanted to rearrange drive letters for me...) NAV Alert (Norton, gotta have it) NAV Auto-Protect (Norton, gotta have it) Network Connections (Pretty much essential) Plug and Play (Not essential but I tend to feel safer leaving this on) Protected Storage (Another non essential but I leave it on just the same) Remote Procedure Call (RPC) (Pretty much essential) Removable Storage (Pretty much essential) Security Accounts Manager (Not essential but logons seem to take longer with it off so I leave it on) SSC Monitor (Third party cache manager, essential for me) System Event Notification (Pretty much essential) TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service (Pretty much essential) Windows Management Instrumentation (Pretty much essential) Windows Management Instrumentation Driver Extensions (Seems to come on whether manual or automatic.) Workstation (Pretty much essential) Of all the services I have on I set them all to automatic, some were set to manual but would come on anyway. In order to speed up the windows logon its just easier to set them to automatic. BTW. I tried SHS's tweak and so far it seems to work as advertised. I'll keep you posted if anything untold happens with it.

There were the beginnings of a decent discussion about this last week but it became a kind of personal vendetta between some folks. It got me to thinking though and as I just redid my system I thought I would share my results. Before Turning Off Some Services Mem Usage Handles Threads Processes 209608 3121 216 23 Services Turned Off Computer Browser Diskeeper Messenger Print Spooler Remote Registry Service RunAs Service Server After Turning Off the Above Services Mem Usage Handles Threads Processes 207052 2897 198 20 While the memory savings were not huge(a little over 2%) the reduction of system handles becomes more prevelant(almost 8%) and the reduction of system threads beomes almost 9%. Now while on a system with adequate memory(256mg or more) this will probably not be noticed but on lower end systems this savings could become much more important expecially when trying to run some memory/thread hog applications...ie Word 2000 and the like. There are a few other services that I could have turned off but with 1 gig of system ram, I frankly don't see the point. This is not an endorsement of any point of view save my own; just something I wanted to know for myself......

I have the greatest respect for the members here and this board. Arstechnica is also a good site. Gentlemen please leave this alone. Alec I have no problem with your work(in fact I'd like to have some of your programming talents). Dr Pizza I don't know any work that you have done other than stuff from ARS; but the point is this has become personal and not objective BY EITHER PARTY. Just agree to disagree and leave it at that...isn't that what makes America great anyway?

Just thought I'd share a couple of quick win2k tweaks that i have been using. They have really made a noticible differnce in the speed of my machine. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001 "NtfsEncryptionService"="Efs" "Win31FileSystem"=dword:00000000 "Win95TruncatedExtensions"=dword:00000001 "NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001 "NtfsAllowExtendedCharacterIn8dot3Name"=dword:00000000 "ReadAheadThreshold"=hex:00,00,20,00 "DriveWriteBehind"=hex:ff,ff,ff,ff "NameCache"=hex:ff,ff,00,00 "PathCache"=hex:ff,00,00,00 "ContigFileAllocSize"=dword:00000400 "AsyncFileCommit"=dword:00000001 The path and name cache are holdovers from win95 days but still seem to work well. Unfortunatle I don't know who to thank for the read ahead and write behind entries. The rest i gather from reading microsofts site. Anyway I hope this helps someone......later....

No problem, glad I could help.....

The easiest way I have found to disable the annoying recycle bin beep is to do a quick registry edit here: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound] "Beep"="No" "ExtendedSounds"="No" Just Set Beep and Extended sounds to no, reboot and you're set....

While its not possible to use the NT shell for windows 2000, you can make it look like the NT shell by using the following registry tweak. Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER Key: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer Name: ClassicShell Data Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1 A value of 1 makes it look like the NT4 interface and a value of 0 will be the normal 2000 interface.

This is not a tweak per say just some info that I didn't know and figured others didn't know as well. Windows 2000 defaults to a maximum of 256meg of paged pool memory and defaults to a maximum of 340meg of nonpagedpool memory The only way around this limitation is to boot with the /3GB switch enabled. So those of us running 512meg of memory or more and have a large 500meg+ swapfile seem to be wasting disk space and not getting the full use of our ram. The keys can be found in the registry at [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] PagedPoolSize : Dword NonPagedPoolSize : Dword Here are a couple of links to micrsofts site for more info... http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q126/4/02.asp http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q126/7/67.asp http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q108/4/49.asp Clutch, Phillip; Am I reading this right, can either of you confirm this?