Here’s a little oddity for Windows XP users with five minutes to spare. Buried deep in a system sub-folder there’s quite a pleasant little tune that you’ve probably never heard, unless you were present when Windows was being installed on your PC. After that it’s never played again, unless you know where to look for it. To hear what you’ve been missing open Windows Explorer or My Computer and work your way to C:\WINDOWS\system32\oobe\images and look for a file called ‘Title.wma’ or possibly ‘Windows welcome music.wma’. It should be around 2.56Mb in size. Double click the file and this will open Windows Media Player, or your preferred media player and proceed to regale you with a gently swooping (though somewhat repetitive) melody for the next five and a half minutes.
SAFE MODE SHORTCUT
Here’s a tip for advanced users with troublesome Windows XP Pro PCs (it also works with XP Home but see note below). Repeatedly restarting in Safe Mode can be a bit of a chore so here’s a way to add Safe Mode start to your Boot Menu. Right click My Computer, select Properties then the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery click the Settings button then the Edit button. Boot.ini opens in Notepad. Carefully highlight and Copy the line: ‘multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect’. Paste the copied line immediately underneath the original and change “Microsoft Windows XP Professional” to Microsoft Windows Safe Mode”. At the end of this line add the following ‘/safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog’ (without the quotes), Save and Exit Boot.ini, restart and Safe Mode should be listed on the Boot Menu.
N.B if you don’t see a Boot Menu when you start Windows XP select the option in the Startup and Recovery dialogue box (see above) by checking the item ‘Time to display Operating Systems’ and reduce the time setting to between 5 and 10 seconds.
CONTROL EXPLORER
For some reason best known to Microsoft, Windows Explorer in XP opens on My Documents, which can be incredibly frustrating if you’re trying to access the contents of your C: drive. Fortunately there is a solution, the first step is to create a desktop shortcut to Windows Explorer, so go to Start > Programs > Accessories and right click on the Explorer icon and select Send To > Desktop (Create Shortcut). Return to the desktop and right-click on the new Windows Explorer icon and select Properties. In the Target line, after explorer.exe, add the following ‘/e,c:\’, so it should now read … explorer.exe /e,c:\
(Note the space between .exe and /e, there’s a comma after the /e and it’s a backslash, not forward slash after c:). You might also want to put a copy of this shortcut onto the Quick Launch toolbar, under the Start button, to do that hold down the Ctrl key (to make a copy) then drag and drop the new Windows Explorer icon.
TIMER SHUTDOWN
Here’s a useful tip if you want to make sure your children switch the PC off at a particular time, or even limit your own usage to prompt you to go home/get to bed at a reasonable hour. XP has a built-in utility called Shutdown that can be programmed to switch the PC off after a predetermined delay. To use Shutdown go to Run on the Start menu and type ‘cmd’ (without the quotes) and this will bring up a DOS type window. Now type the following command: ‘shutdown.exe –s –t xx’, where –s is the shutdown ‘switch’, -t is the time switch and xx is the delay in seconds. So, if you want the PC to shutdown in 15 minutes, say, the command would be: ‘shutdown.exe –s –t 900’. When the Enter is pressed the countdown begins, with a dialogue box on the screen showing the time left and warning the user to save their work. For a full list of the switches available for this utility just type shutdown.exe at the command prompt.
Copy Error Messages To Clipboard
What’s the first thing you do when you see a baffling error message in Windows? If you are anything like me you’ll pick out the keywords and look it up on Google. That’s fine when it’s something simple but all too often error messages are long-winded and contain lots of gibberish, which are a pain to type into the search box The temptation, is to try and copy and paste the message, but you will find that this doesn’t work as you can’t highlight the words in an error box, but there is another way.
Here’s a nifty little tweak that I came across the other day on Asp.net. From Windows 2k onwards you have been able to copy the text in error messages to the Windows Clipboard by pressing Ctrl + C, but Microsoft forgot to tell anyone. So the next time you get an indecipherable error message, just press Ctrl + C then open Notepad, WordPad, Word etc and press Ctrl + V, then you can highlight the text, and use it to search for a solution.
