A Faster, Better Behaved Windows XP
First, if you're looking for help with XP problems, please visit The Elder Geek Forum On Windows XP. There are other places to get help as well. See this section.
If you've been hunting around for stuff on Windows XP lately, you've surely noticed that there are about 500,000,000 web pages with material on the subject. maybe 500,000,000 and 1... but that might be stretching it. Why then am I adding to that number? I'm not in this just for the cheap thrill of building a new web page; I have a suspicion (now confirmed by some emails I've gotten) that the effort will turn into something worth the while of someone other than the author. Then too, I like to gab about computers, Windows in particular, and I don't get to do a lot of it in real life. So here is where I will talk about Windows XP and imagine that someone is listening. And you are (you're here after all, right?:)), so thanks for dropping in.
These sections go into how I maintain a clean install of Windows XP Pro SP2 and keep it running as fast and as problem-free as I know how on a Celeron-A 466mhz with 288mb of RAM and a pair of 20g IDE hard drives. (By the way, I used a program called AIDA32 to generate a summary of my system... It's here if you're interested. More info and news about AIDA32 available here.)
Also talked about are tools, methods, commands etc for getting more out of Windows XP, doing things more efficiently, getting to places faster, saving time, saving keystrokes, and more. Another way you might look at this page is as one that can make a good Windows XP system better, one that helps keep a good XP machine from going bad, or one that can help make a bad WinXP installation good again.
Like the Windows 98 page, I'll often use external links to supplement whatever it is I'm trying to explain. And like that page, all the material is free, including the software mentioned.
I started toying with Windows XP in August 2003, and in the first few months I really didn't look on it as anything more than a place to tinker. Truth to tell, I didn't need Windows XP, I just wanted to play with it. I'm not even sure that I absolutely couldn't live without it now-- I mean, who absolutely needs a new operating system, or any operating system...?... or a computer, or the Internet for that matter? Maybe I'll just save that heresy for a philosophy page, if I ever get to it. :)
At the start, I resented XP for not letting me move around the way Windows 98 did. But I found ways around most of the blocks, learned new ways to do old things, and discovered (gladly in most cases) that some older things didn't need to be done anymore. By December I was running out of reasons to keep Windows 98 as the main operating system. But I was still skeptical; I didn't believe that Windows XP could handle my audio software properly, which was why I thought I'd have to play musical chairs with the two operating systems indefinitely. (I had Windows 98 on a separate Fujitsu hard drive and regularly interchanged it with a Western Digital drive that had XP.) But by the new year I found that not only could Windows XP handle the audio apps, in some ways it did things better than Windows 98. Now here we are, with everything working pretty much the way I want, and with some enthusiasm for writing about it.
I almost forgot to put this in... Unlike other versions of Windows (9x comes to mind right away), XP doesn't let just any old user muck around with it. You need to be logged on as an administrator which allows you to tweak, delete, tune, toggle, enable/disable, and so on. That's why it's called being an administrator... you get to administer things... which, in Windows XP terms, makes you God, with the ultimate power of life, death, or something awful in-between... which brings me to the disclaimer:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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