Hands on: Add Tools tab to XP

Being a frequent user of the XP System Configuration Utility (Msconfig.exe), I was rather surprised to see that it had suddenly sprouted another tab, entitled Tools, just like the Vista version.

This provides shortcuts to all sorts of commands that sometimes take a lot of rummaging through the Start Menu or obscure buttons in remote dialogues.

Among those on offer are the System Information tool, the Event Viewer, and Network Diagnostics. Other items here, such as System Properties and the Command Prompt, are more accessible, but it’s useful to have them all in one place.

It appears this came with XP Service Pack 3, but it is available for download separately. It doesn’t appear to be available via Windows Update, but you can download the Tool tab update here. The same page also shows you how to customise the list of tools, should you feel brave enough to dabble in some XML code.

If you fancy a third-party toolbox, try XPSyspad. This provides access to administrative and system tools, Control Panel items and special folders. It will recover Windows and Office product keys, and there’s even a process viewer. Despite the rather alarming domain name, we couldn’t find any trace of malware.

While on the subject of Msconfig, one irritation is that the window is not resizable. This is especially irksome if you are trying to see the command path or Registry location of an item in the Startup tab. Even if you widen a column by dragging the division between the column headers to the full width of the window, it often still isn’t wide enough. Purely by accident, however, I discovered that if you keep dragging the divider right out of the window, the column continues to widen past the available space. So, by judicious use of the horizontal scroll bar, you can see the entries in their entirety. This also works in other fixed-size windows in XP and Vista, such as the Defrag report.

A good hiding
There’s a cunning way of hiding files from others who might have access to your XP computer. You will need an NTFS partition, a file to act as a hiding place, a file to hide and a command prompt window. Assume the partition is C: and create a new folder therein named ‘Hideaway’. Copy to, or create a text file in Hideaway with a sentence or two in it. Let’s call this justtext.txt. Copy the file you want to hide into Hideaway. This can be any file, but for this experiment we’ll use the Windows Solitaire game at C:\Windows\System32\Sol.exe.

Now open a command prompt. Assuming this starts somewhere on the C: drive – it should default to your profile folder - type ‘CD\’, followed by Enter, then ‘CD Hideaway’. You should now be ‘in’ the new folder and see C:\Hideaway> as the command prompt. Now type the following line, then press the Enter key, making sure you get the spaces, punctuation and symbols exactly as shown:

type sol.exe > justtext.txt:sol.exe

Nothing will appear to happen. There will be no message in the command window – just a new prompt and the contents of the folder will look the same – a text file of the original size and the majestic 56KB of sol.exe. Only the modified date of the text file will have changed, and opening it will merely show the original text content. Just to show there’s nothing up your sleeve, you can delete the copy of sol.exe.

Now, at the same command prompt, type the following, again paying attention to the spaces and punctuation, and following it with the Enter key. It’s an oddity of the Start command that it needs the entire path to the file:

start c:\hideaway\justtext.txt:sol.exe

Lo and behold, a game of Solitaire will commence. You can hide any file type in any other file this way. So how does it work?

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