Tips to speed up defrag operations in Windows XP

A simple way to speed up a defrag operation in Microsoft Windows XP is to restart the system before you launch the Defrag application. This allows the operating system to clear out the swap/paging file (may require a change in configuration for ultimate effect) and to reset it to the default size. This lets Defrag focus strictly on the necessary data on the hard disk, without having to stop and manage a huge swap file loaded with unneeded data.

Another approach to speeding up a defrag operation in Windows XP is to configure it to occur immediately upon startup. You can do so easily with a simple registry edit.

Note: Editing the Windows Registry is not without risk. Please save yourself some aggravation and back up your Windows Registry before you do any editing.

With the disclaimer out of the way, follow these steps to start a defrag operation immediately upon startup:

• Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe)
• Go to:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\RunOnce

• Right-click the RunOncesubkey and select New | String Value
• Name the value Defrag and press [Enter] twice
• Type Defrag.exe c: /f in the Value Data text box, and click OK
• Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows

The defrag operation will begin when you type in your password and press [Enter]. (Keep in mind that values added to the RunOnce key are removed immediately after the command has been run.)

Note: This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Professional editions.

• activate windows anda (jika original Windows XP).
• install motherboard driver dan graphic card driver (jika pakai) serta lain2 driver yang perlu
• install antivirus
• install ms office (penting untuk anda menaip)
• install software2 lain yang berkaitan seperti WinAmp, WinZip, WinRar, Audio ngan viseo codec dan lain2 lagi.

Semoga berjaya.

Misplaced passwords can render Windows systems useless. Minus a valid username and password, Windows boxes, and the data they contain, are essentially off limits.

The situation arises frequently. Users leave. Past consultants fail to document deployments. IT professionals quit.

Without documentation, accessing critical Windows systems and data becomes problematic. Despite numerous aspersions from the open source community, Microsoft’s NTFS file system delivers decent performance and security.

However, a free open source program often makes quick work of cracking Windows passwords. The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (download this)presents a potential option for obtaining access to locked-out Windows NT-based systems. Here’s how you can use it to recover lost passwords on your Windows systems.

The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a free Linux-based utility, which as the name suggests, works offline. The code creates its own boot environment. Once you burn the ISO image to a CD-ROM, you’ll have a tool at your disposal for resetting Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista account passwords. You wont even have to know any of the current account user names or passwords on the system to make it work.

Instead, the utility detects user accounts and enables resetting the password to a value you decide. The application will even reset locked or disabled user accounts.

When you first boot the utility, you’ll see the screen shown in Figure A.

Figure A

The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor presents this menu upon booting.

Recognize The Dangers

As the name suggests, the utility edits the Windows registry. Further, the application edits the registry in a completely unsupported and warranty- and Microsoft-support voiding way.

In other words, the password-cracking software is used at your own risk. The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor could easily render a system unbootable. The unauthorized program could also destroy existing data resident on a Windows system.

This is especially true if the Encrypting File System (EFS) has been used to protect sensitive data. In fact, if you use it to change the password on an account that’s used EFS to protect files, it’s unlikely those files can ever be recovered.

But, left to no other option, you may find the software is just what’s needed to break into a system for which passwords have been lost or misplaced.

Driver Issues

Using the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor requires that you place the CD in the system in question and reboot it. Once the utility starts, its initial boot screen will appear. Users should pay particular attention to the warning that appears stating, “This software comes with absolutely no warranties! The author can not be held responsible for any damage caused by the (mis) use of this software.” Again, the utility should only be used as a last resort.

But faced with using options of last resort is often where computer professionals find themselves. When such situations arise, and all other means of accessing the data (including removing the hard disk from the existing system and attempting to recover its data from another system) prove fruitless, the offline editor may well work.

In my experience, the most common issue I encounter is the lack of driver support for SATA controllers. The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is frequently updated with bug fixes, and driver support is among the regular improvements the utility receives. That said, you may encounter situations where drivers need to be manually loaded as you can see in Figure B.

Figure B

The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor attempts to auto-load drivers based on information it discovers while booting.

When the program fails to locate active Windows installations, you can attempt to manually load disk drivers by entering m at the provided command prompt. Upon selecting M, you’ll be presented with an extensive menu of potential drivers, as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

You can select the drivers you need.

The password-resetting software doesn’t always recognize installed hard disks, as can be seen here. In this case, the utility doesn’t possess the necessary drivers to connect to a RAID installation. It’s for that reason that the software reports disk partitions don’t contain valid partition tables in this image.

Resetting Passwords

Once driver issues are resolved (in many cases the program’s auto-detection works without any trouble), you can connect to the system’s registry and make the necessary edits. With the proper drivers, the offline editor displays installed disks and resident disk partitions. You need to select the specific Windows installation you wish to edit by entering its partition number at the provided command prompt as shown in Figure D.

Figure D

Select the partition with Windows on it.

The offline editor breaks into several steps the process of resetting Windows passwords. Step One involves specifying the Windows installation and partition.

With the disk and partition selected, the utility then prompts users to specify the registry directory path to edit. The default is WINDOWS\system32\config. In most cases this default entry is correct. You need only press the [Enter] key to specify the default value.

Next users are prompted to enter the task they wish to perform, as shown in Figure E. The offline editor provides three options: Password reset, RecoveryConsole parameters, and Quit. To reset passwords, enter 1 at the command prompt.

Figure E

Administrators should enter 1, for password reset, when prompted.

Upon selecting the password reset option, you’ll then be prompted to specify the action to perform. The options are:

• Edit user data and passwords
• Syskey status & change
• RecoveryConsole settings
• Registry editor
• Quit

To reset passwords, select 1 – Edit user data and passwords.

The utility will then display user information and password status. Specify the user account for which you wish to reset the password by typing the user account name and pressing Enter.

Once you specify the user the utility requests that you supply a new password as seen in Figure F. In my experience, supplying a blank password usually works best. The utility’s publisher also recommends blanking the password.To supply a blank password, type an asterisk (*) and press [Enter].

Figure F

The password-cracking utility prompts administrators to specify the user account and provide a new password.

Upon specifying the new password (or blanking it out), the program prompts you to confirm you wish to make the change. Type a [Y] and press [Enter] to confirm you wish to complete the edit.

At this point it’s tempting to reboot the system and attempt to log in to the user account with the new (or blanked out) password. However, one last step remains. You must instruct the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor to actually write the edits to the Windows system registry.

The process becomes less than intuitive here. To complete the process, you must enter the quit command. Typing an exclamation point [!] and pressing [Enter] quits the program. Previously in the process, [Q] is used to quit the process, so make note of the difference here.

After you do so, the utility will present a Main Interactive Menu. Several choices are presented:

• Edit user data and passwords
• Syskey status & change
• RecoveryConsole settings
• Registry editor
• Quit

To complete the password reset operation, enter [Q] to quit.

The program then prompts you to complete step four, which involves writing the edits to the Windows registry. To complete the password reset registry edit, type [Y] and press [Enter]. The program will write the change to Windows SAM file and display an Edit Complete confirmation. At this point you can reboot the Windows system and, if the utility worked as designed, log into the user account using the password (or blanked password) you specified as part of step three.

Linux to the rescue

As you can see, if you don’t have an administrator password for your system, all is not lost. The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor possesses the ability to penetrate locked out systems and restore access to user accounts and data. However, the utility can just as easily destroy a Windows system’s data. For that reason, the tool should only be used as a last resort (and only on systems for which you possess complete ownership and/or administrative authority).

If you have some Microsoft Windows XP clients that run slower than others, it could be due to some of the default settings located in the Performance Options dialog box. You can change the options in this dialog box to boost the performance of a Windows XP client. Let’s examine the settings you can change to tweak Windows XP’s performance.

Performance Options dialog box

The most useful Windows XP performance-tuning options are on the Visual Effects and Advanced tabs of the Performance Options dialog box. You’ll find this box via the System Properties control panel by clicking the Settings button under Performance (Start | Control Panel | System | Performance | Settings). Figure A shows both the Visual Effects and Advanced tabs with the performance options you can easily modify.

Figure A

Performance Options — Visual Effects and Advanced tab

Visual Effects tab

The Visual Effects tab is the easiest place to start when troubleshooting certain performance problems. By default, Windows XP enables visual effects, such as the “scroll” option for the Start menu. These effects consume system resources, though. If you’re troubleshooting a sluggish system, you can potentially improve its performance by choosing the Adjust For Best Performance option, which will disable many of these visual effects settings. Of course, you’ll lose the cool visual effects, but there’s always a trade-off for performance.

Advanced performance settings

For troubleshooting something more than sluggish screen redraws, you’ll need to adjust the performance options on the Advanced tab of the Performance Options dialog box. There are three sections: Processor Scheduling, Memory Usage, and Vvirtual Memory. Each of these sections’ settings have a major impact on how your system operates.

Processor Scheduling

The Processor Scheduling section controls how much processor time Windows XP devotes to a program or process. The processor has a finite amount of resources to divide among the various applications. Choosing the Programs option will devote the most processor time to the program running in the foreground. Choosing Background Services allocates equal processor time to all running services, which can include print jobs and other applications running in the background. If your users complain about slow-running programs, you could try setting the processor scheduling to Programs.

On the flip side, if users complain that print jobs never print or are very slow to print, or if they run a macro in one application while working in another, you may want to assign equal time slices (called quanta) to each process by choosing the Background Services option. If you use the Windows XP machine in question as a server, you’re better off choosing the Background Services option.

Memory Usage

The next section, Memory Usage, details how Windows XP uses system RAM. The first option in the section, Programs, allocates more RAM to running applications. For desktop systems with very little RAM, this selection gives the best performance. In systems with less RAM, you need to devote as much RAM as possible to just running Windows and your applications. For a server or a desktop with a lot of RAM, however, choosing the System Cache setting will yield better performance. When set to System Cache, the system will use most of the available RAM as a disk cache, which can result in major performance improvements on systems that depend on disk I/O.

Virtual Memory

Finally, there are a number of settings in the Virtual Memory section that affect how Windows XP performs. Virtual memory is an area on the disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. Windows requires this type of system in the event that it runs out of physical RAM. The virtual memory space is used as a swap space where information residing in RAM is written to the virtual memory space (also called the page file or swap file) in order to free RAM up for other processes.

When the system needs the information in the swap file, Windows puts it back into RAM and writes something else out to the disk in its place. Figure B shows the virtual memory settings for my laptop.

Figure B

Virtual Memory

Windows XP has a recommended default page file size of 1.5 times the amount of system RAM. Since I have 1GB of RAM in my laptop, the recommended size is 1.5GB, although I only have 768MB currently allocated for this purpose. I allow the paging file to grow as needed, up to a maximum size of 1.5GB. You can also choose to let Windows completely manage this file or to have no file at all. I highly recommend that you do not remove the paging file because you’ll experience a noticeable degradation of system performance without it.

One way to boost system performance is to place the paging file on a separate physical hard drive from the operating system. The only caveat is if the second drive is slower than the primary drive, you’d want to leave the paging file where it is.

You can also span the paging file across multiple disks to increase performance. To make changes to the virtual memory, click the Change tab on the Advanced tab of the Performance Options dialog box, make your desired changes, and click Set. Any changes you make won’t take effect until you reboot the machine.

Power users tip

If you want to get every last ounce of power out of your machine but you don’t want to sacrifice any unnecessary disk space, you can use the Windows XP performance monitor to see how much of your paging file is taken up during normal usage and adjust its size accordingly. For example, if you have a 1-GB page file, but only 40 percent of it is used during normal operations, you may want to set it to 512MB instead. You can gather this information by watching the % Usage and % Usage Peak counters for the paging file (Figure C).

Figure C

Windows XP Performance Monitor

I recommend these changes only if you have time to tinker. Most of the time, the operating system’s recommendations will work just fine.

When you open your microsoft office or other office like Microsoft Outlook they ask you for sku011.cab file. the file is missing.

To solve this problem
Solution below:


Regedit (start menu -> run -> type regedit)


Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Microsoft -> Office -> 11.0 -> Delivery

There should be only 1 directory under Delivery, which is your DownloadCode (mine was 90000409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9). Select that directory. On the right side of the screen, right-click on CDCache. Change the value to 0.

My problem solved.