Removing Unnecessary Programs from Starting Automatically

Many programs add portions of themselves starting automatically on every login.
This can be either in the Startup Folder or the Registry.

One easy way to tell is by looking at how many icons are in your system tray. If you have a large number, perhaps unnecessary resources are being allocated them as well as increasing your boot time.

Typical examples are Microsoft Office, Office FindFast, Real Player, ATI Video setting etc.

You can remove them in one of three main ways:

In the Start / Programs / Startup Folder

In the Registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Run

If you have Win98, WinME or Windows2000 you can use MSCONFIG to easily remove programs. This is my preference since it allows you to toggle them back on again in case you make a mistake

Change the Registered Owner and Organization (All Windows)

If you entered the wrong registration information when you installed Windows you can change it and other miscellaneous settings such as ProductID and ProductName.

Open your registry and find the key below for your operating system.

Windows 95, 98 and Me:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion]

Windows NT, 2000 and XP:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion]

Modify the strings values of ‘RegisteredOwner’ and ‘RegisteredOrganization’ to equal the required owner and company names.

Settings:
Name: RegisteredOwner, RegisteredOrganization
Type: REG_SZ (String Value)

Erase Your Data Trail

Start the Registry Editor by clicking Start, Run, and type “regedit” (without quotes).

Go to this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
Session Manager\Memory Management

On the right, locate the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value.
Right-click the value, select modify, and change the data value of the registry key to 1.

If the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value doesn’t exist, add it. Right-click the right side of your specified key and add it as a DWORD value. Then change the data value to 1.

Restart for your changes to take effect.

Note: Your shutdown time may slightly increase.

Capture a DOS Print

One of the things I have been driven nuts by is all the DOS programs my clients still must use. As I move more of them to XP I find the issue of sharing a networked printer with a DOS program a bigger deal. We came across the solution the other day.

On the client machine first make sure you have the printer shared you want to use. Next tell the client machine to add a new printer. Make sure you tell it the printer is local and hooked to a local LPT. There should be no actual physcial printer here.

When doing this I find a generic text printer works excellent for this. Most DOS programs only do text anyway. But you can use older printers as well.

Once this pretend local printer is installed go back into the printers and go to properties for this pretend printer. Go to the Ports tab, select the Pool Ports check box and now check the port that points to your networked printer.

Now what will happen is when you tell your DOS program to print to the fictious local printer port it will instead be routed to the network printer you have selected.

I have used this tip on 4 different programs in DOS and all have worked perfect.

Backup Outlook Express email

One of the most important things to create backup copies of, is your email messages. Here’s a short guide on how to do this if you use the Outlook Express mail client.

Copy the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{long sequence of numbers and letters}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

to a backup location (blank CD, Zip disk, backup HD, etc.).

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To import the email back into OE:

1) Open Outlook Express
2) Click File – Import – Messages
3) Highlight Microsoft Outlook Express 6, and click Next
4) Choose Import mail from an OE6 store directory, and click OK
5) Browse to the location (folder) where you backed up your email and click OK.

That’s it. You’ve now imported all your old emails.

This is especially useful for clean installs of your operating system, or moving emails to a different machine.