Wh!5t|eR

Give hard disks a friendly name (XP)
If your computer has more than one hard disk, it’s often a good idea to store different files on each one – programs on drive C, for example, and music files on drive D. If so, why not give each disk a friendly name? Open My Computer, right-click the hard disk and select Rename, then type in something appropriate – we called our second disk ‘music and video’.

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Check your specs (XP)
Sometimes it’s helpful to know some basic information about the parts inside your PC. For details on the processor and memory, right-click the My Computer icon and select Properties. Look at the bottom of the box that appears: under the word ‘Computer’ you’ll find, the type of processor inside, along with its speed (in MHz or GHz), and then the amount of memory, which will look something like ‘512MB of Ram’.

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Move My Documents (XP) Folder to a safe place
Now that hard disks are larger and cheaper than ever, it’s easy to keep documents and programs separate. If you’ve added a new hard disk, it’s easy to move the My Documents folder over to it. Click the Start button > right-click on > My Documents > and select > Properties. Click the Move button and then choose a folder on the new disk. Click OK once again and click Yes to move existing documents to the new folder.

I was an early Tester of VISTA RTM and one thing I really liked was Creating a "Users\Login Name" Folder off the Root and that greatly reduces the path to your Documents. You See by default the Normal XP Path to My Documents is (by example):
C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\My Documents before you ever get to My Music or My Pictures. Well Deeper is not always better when it comes to lang file names. I mean it's nice to be more discriptive of your files but in the default state, you are starting with at least adding 50 plus Characters to every file you have and most backup programs seem to limit you to 156 Characters per name.
So Make a Folder Called
Users > Make Folder Name so maybe it looks like D:\Users\SirD and Move the Pointer on My Documents Properties to that folder. It will move your files for you and that folder will become known as "My Documents" And that folder could be on a Flash Drive.

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Manage notification area icons (XP)
If you install lots of programs on your computer, the notification area in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen can become full. To make it more manageable, right-click the Taskbar, select Properties and tick the box labelled ‘Hide inactive icons’. This generally works well, but sometimes useful icons can disappear.

If this happens, right-click the Taskbar and select Properties again, then click the Customize button. Click the icon you want to see, then select ‘Always Show’ from the menu to its right and click OK.

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Advanced Autoplay (XP)
When you insert a CD or DVD into a Windows XP computer, Windows will pop up an Autoplay window asking you what to do with it. This can be very handy, but if you want to do the same thing each time it can be skipped. Open My Computer, right-click on the CD or DVD drive and select Properties, then click the Autoplay tab.

Select a type of file from the dropdown menu, then choose the action you want the computer to perform from the list below it. For example, we like to set ‘Mixed Content’ discs so Windows will ‘Open folder to view files’ without asking us each time. Different options can be set for each different type of files.

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Quick internet test (XP)
Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a broadband internet connection is broken, or whether there’s a problem with your web browser. For a quick way to tell, press the Windows key and R together to launch the Run box, then type cmd and press Enter. A black window will appear. Type ping Computeractive - simple clear computer advice and press Enter. Windows will attempt to connect to our website.

If several lines of text beginning with ‘reply’ appear, the connection is fine. If not, check your broadband connection and try again.

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Static Disk Allocation
Run SYSEDIT.EXE from the Run command.

Expand the system.ini file window.

Scroll down almost to the end of the file till you find a line called [386enh].

Press Enter to make one blank line, and in that line type

Irq14=4096

Note: This line IS CASE SENSITIVE!!!

Click on the File menu, then choose Save.

Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer.


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ctfMon
Ctfmon is the Microsoft process that controls Alternative User Input and the Office Language bar. It's how you can control the computer via speech or a pen tablet, or using the onscreen keyboard inputs for asian languages.
If you are using any of the above, you should leave it enabled. For everybody else, we'll get to the job of disabling this annoying service.

Depending on your system configuration, there are a number of different steps to disable it. I've tried to list all the methods below.
Disabling in Microsoft Office 2003
We can remove the alternative text input from Microsoft Office 2003 by just removing that feature in the setup.
Note: I haven't figured out where the equivalent setting is for Office 2007 (if there is one), but we can also disable it a different way below.
Go to Add/Remove programs, choose to Change your installation of Microsoft Office and make sure you check the box for "Choose advanced customization of applications" before you hit next.

Find "Alternative User Input" in the list and change the dropdown to "Not available" so it looks like this:


Disabling in Windows XP
There's an additional step we can take to make sure it gets turned off in Windows XP, which really seems to be the best answer for XP users.
Open up Control Panel and choose Regional and Language Options.

Find ctfmon in the list and disable it by unchecking the box. Just remember that if you haven't disabled ctfmon through one of the other settings this won't help you a lot.

If all else fails You can just completely unregister the dlls that run the alternative input services by running these two commands from the run box (one at a time)

Regsvr32.exe /u msimtf.dll
Regsvr32.exe /u msctf.dll

End Of Part2