Operating System Tweaks: Windows 2000/XP

General Windows Annoyances
Have you come across an annoying problem in Windows that just bothers you so much you want to get rid of it? These tweaks tackle some of the more annoying problems with Windows and take care of them.

AIM Related Problems and Tweaks

This isn’t a Windows per say, but there are a few issue that has been complained about a number of times about AIM.

Buddy List Limited to 200 buddies
First, there is a 200-entry limit for the number of users you can have on your buddy list. There is a very simple registry tweak to increase the limitation number. Go to this key in the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/America Online/AOL Instant Messenger (TM)/CurrentVersion/Buddy. Double click the MaxBuddies DWORD value. C8 is the default which sets the limit to 200. Set this value reasonable amount.

Saving Away Messages
There are some people who only have the default away message and don’t really care much about it. There are other people that go nuts and have one or multiple sliding lists full of custom away messages. When it comes time to backup files and settings up for a reformat, this can be handy if fall in the second category of people.

Open up regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/America Online/AOL Instant Messenger (TM)/CurrentVersion/Users. Open up the key with your AIM username. Export the IamGoneList key. This is where all your away messages are stored. To restore them after AIM is installed, simply double click on the .reg file and restore the key.

Cut, Copy & Paste Icons on the Toolbar
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One of the consistent features between different Windows Operating Systems was the handy cut, copy and paste icons on the toolbar of Windows explorer during file & folder browsing. By default, these icons do not appear.

Double click on “My Computer”, right click up on the toolbar and click “Customize”. A “Customize Toolbar” window should appear and just add/remove icons as you see fit.

Delay When Opening “My Computer”
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It is a sure thing that you have sat in front of your monitor more than a few times and waited for “My Computer” to load. There is a simple fix to eliminate the wait time.

Open up “My Computer”, go to Tools > Folder Options and select the “View” tab. Uncheck “Automatically search for network folders and printers” and hit OK. Now try opening up “My Computer”. Notice a difference?

Driver Signing

It’s a pain to be prompted by Windows warning you about “unsigned drivers” whenever you need to install third party drivers for hardware. No, there’s nothing wrong with installing “unsigned drivers”. They merely lack Microsoft’s stamp of approval. The only thing the prompts are good at is slowing down a driver installation. Here’s the simple fix that gets rid of those annoying prompts.

Right click “My Computer” and click “Properties”. Go to the “Hardware” tab and click on “Driver Signing”. Select “Ignore” for the action. You will never be bothered by those pesky prompts again.

Error Reporting
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On the occasion that a program, or even the entire Operating System experiences a crash, you are greeted with a prompt to send an error report back to Microsoft. I don’t know about everybody else, but most of the time when I get this, it isn’t usually the Operating System’s fault and I would never bother to send a report.

To turn off this prompting, go to Control Panel > System >”Advanced” tab and click “Error Reporting”. Select “Disable Error Reporting”, but leave “But notify me when a critical error occurs” checked, for it’s sometimes a good idea to see it and it sometimes give a clue as to what happened.

IE’s Image Auto-Resize

Whenever IE6 comes across an odd sized image or an image that is larger than the viewable screen, it resizes the image to fit. Many people would much rather view images at their true size, so here’s how to avoid it. In IE, go to Tools > Internet Options and select the “Advanced” tab. Scroll down to the “Multimedia Options” and uncheck “Enable Automatic Image Resizing”.

Logon Background

If you are one of those people who choose to disable the Windows XP Welcome screen (or are simply running Windows 2000) and want to replace the old boring background that appears with the login dialog, this tweak will do the trick. This sets the background for the login screen only, and is separate from the desktop background.

First, open up regedit and navigate to this registry key: HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop. On the right panel there should be a string value named “Wallpaper” (if not, simply create it). Double click on it and enter the full path to a bitmap (bmp) file that is going to be used for the background. For example: C:/Documents and Settings/Bob/My Documents/picture.bmp.

If you would like to tile the wallpaper, double click on the string value “TileWallpaper” and set the value to 1 (a value of 0 turns off tiling). If you would like to stretch the wallpaper, double-click the string value “WallpaperStyle” and set the value to 2 (the “TileWallpaper” value must be a 0 for this to work)

Finally, if you just wish to change the background color instead of setting a background image, go to: HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Colors. Double click on the “Background” string value and change the values.

The values are in R G B; the default should be something similar to 0 78 152, meaning the Red component is 0; Green is 78; and Blue is 152.