How to cure Microsoft’s nagging little ills

6. Forgetful Autoplay
You can also give XP Antispy the job of turning off the Autoplay function for CDs. You’ll find this option under Miscellaneous settings: If you enable it, XP Antispy simply changes the value of the Registry key Autorun under Hkey_Local_Machine\ System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom from 1 (on) to 0 (off).

This will ensure that Windows does not bother you again by asking what it should do with a CD or removable storage media. However, this will also stop program CDs from auto-installing as soon as they are inserted.

7. Info bubbles
Windows invites you to take a tour, your ISP tells you that you’re online and the network card you disconnected complains about the lack of connectivity. The System Tray is always popping up annoying yellow info balloons. To stifle your PC’s desire to communicate, one change to the Registry is enough. Under Hkey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced, change the value EnableBalloonTips from 1 to 0. If it doesn’t already exist, create it using New/DWORD string. By default, it will be set to 0 and you won’t have to change it.

Windows hides more annoying features in the same Registry key, such as the info balloons for the Start button and the desktop icons. Every time you move the mouse pointer over the Start button you see a message that tells you to ‘Click here to begin’.

In exactly the same way, pop-ups tell you what desktop shortcuts do. You can disable the balloon tip for the Start button by setting the value for StartButtonBalloonTip to 0. To prevent Windows from showing a text box for every desktop icon, the value for ShowInfoTip must also be set to 0. For the changes to take effect, you must reboot.

8. Ineffective search
Those who don’t have a tidy mind are always complaining about the antiquated search function in Windows. Unless it has indexed all the files on your PC, the animated puppy (if you haven’t already buried him) in Windows XP trawls through every file and folder each time a search is requested.

This can be time-consuming, especially if you have only a vague idea of the right search term to use. Windows does have an indexing feature, but it is turned off by default. Even when it’s on it never seems to help much.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Copernic offer practical desktop search engines. Our favourite was Yahoo X1 because it used the least amount of resources during indexing and had the best search performance. Google and Microsoft’s alternatives either use too much power during cataloguing or take too long to display the results.

If you don’t want to install a search tool on your PC, you can send XP’s animated sniffer dog back to its basket: switch to Classic search mode by clicking on Hkey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ CabinetState in the Registry, and then adding a new String Value using the context menu. Name it Use Search Asst (with spaces). Allocate the new entry a value of ‘no’.

9. Hidden files
Hidden files can’t even be seen by the Windows search tools without some tweaking. To protect your PC from clumsy clicking, the operating system hides important files by default. This means that experienced users quickly lose their patience if they want to, say, edit a line in Boot.ini quickly.

But hidden files and folders can be made visible again with a few mouse clicks in the Explorer Tools/Folder options dialogue. Deselect ‘Do not show hidden files and folders’. This will select Show hidden files and folders. You can also choose whether Windows should display the contents of system folders.

This means that Windows will not irritate you any longer by being too over-cautious, but whenever you try to open a file with an unregistered extension by double-clicking on it, you’ll see a dialogue complaining that the file can’t be opened. Windows will suggest searching for a suitable program on the web. However, in our test the Windows File Associations site it takes you to did not suggest any matches for suffixes such as NCC, SAM or WQ1. We found the answers here.

To prevent Windows from starting any online queries in future when you attempt to open files of an unknown type, go to the Registry key Hkey_Local_Machine\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\ system.

Choose Edit/New and then select Dword string. Enter the string NoInternet-OpenWith. Next, select the new string and select Modify from the Edit menu. Make sure that Hexadecimal is selected and enter 1 in the Value data field.

After the computer has been restarted, Windows will spare you the question about the web service. You can specify file type associations from the File Types section of the Tools/Folder Options dialogue.

10. Overloaded design
Initially, Windows XP may appear intuitive, but in long-term use it’s slow, and the many animations and effects in the interface are distracting. You can turn the brightly coloured design off with a few clicks in the Control Panel’s Display module. Click on the Designs tab and select the entry Windows Classic from the dropdown list. The system will change its appearance without a restart. You will have to alter the Start Menu’s appearance separately.

Right-click on the Start button and choose Properties from the context menu. The Start menu tab allows you to customise the appearance. If you have a lot of applications on your computer, after clicking the Customize button enable the Scroll Programs option so clicking on Start/Programs opens a scrollable list of programs.

Expanding the Programs List takes time. You can change the delay in the Registry: find the key Hkey_Current_ User\ControlPanel\Desktop. Open the entry MenuShowDelay by double-clicking on it and enter a value of 200. In the Registry branch under Hkey_Current_User\ControlPanel\Desktop\WindowMetrics you can also turn off the animations used when maximising, minimising or moving windows. To do this, create a string in the key called MinAnimate and allocate it a value of 0.