The Bare Minimum Processes Needed to Run Windows XP

When repairing a PC by either trying to shutdown a virus, trying to remove adware/spyware/malware, or just trying to get a speed increase, you need to shut down processes that run in the background.

It is necessary to know the bare minimum processes which Windows needs to operate, and it is sometimes difficult to tell.

Here is a list of the essential processes that Windows needs to run correctly.

System Idle Process

explorer.exe

taskmgr.exe

spoolsv.exe

lsass.exe

csrss.exe

smss.exe

winlogon.exe

svchost.exe – You will notice more than one running.

services.exe

By shutting down anything other than these processes, stand alone Windows should operate fine, however, if any of these processes are shutdown, Windows will start to become unstable, or unusable.

On most computers there will be multiple instances of svchost.exe, these control various connections on your computer whether it is to the Internet, or within a LAN. It is usually safe to switch off some of these, however, it’s not easy to determine which ones, so its better to leave these alone.

To shutdown a Windows process, Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete which will take you to Windows Task Manager, click on the Processes Tab, select a process and click End Process.

If you are not sure what a particular process does, then I recommend checking out Uniblue Process Library, a library that lists what each task does, its threat level,and makes it easy to determine what is running on your computer.

Read more »

Bypass The Windows XP Log On Screen

To make logon an unattended process:

Click [Start] [Run] and type

control userpasswords2

Click [OK]

The [User Accounts] Property Sheet displays.

On [Users] tab, clear the [Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer] check box.

Click [Apply].

Enter a user name and password that should be used to logon automatically in the dialog box that appears.

Click [OK].

Go to [Control Panel] [User Accounts] [Change the Way Users Log On and Off].

Uncheck [Use the Welcome Screen] and [Use Fast User Switching]

Read more »

The Sun sets on XP as Microsoft phases it out despite interest

Windows XP has been the iconic operating system since it debuted in October of 2001. By today's standards the computers made back then were little more than large calculators but perhaps I am exaggerating that point. Since that time Windows XP was installed on every single computer sold but now the sun is going to set on the operating system that was known as Windows XP.
Microsoft is intent on no longer making OEM versions of Windows XP, this means computer manufacturers will no longer be able to install XP on systems unless they have a very specific agreement with Microsoft or are just good buddies with them like Dell.
Dell will introduce systems under a Customized with XP slogan, there really isn't much more information on that but these systems won't be on offer until later this year. Other manufacturers will probably just offer Vista on all their systems since Dell is the only one to have strong objections to this so far. But, Dell also has some of the strongest ties with Microsoft so it makes sense THEY could get away with it.
This could also mean that you will no longer be able to pick up OEM copies of XP from online retailers like Newegg and others. It has not been speculated on what this means for full retail copies of XP, my guess is that its demise is not far behind.
APCMag is reporting that by early 2008 most of Microsoft's contracts with computer manufacturers will require them to install Vista only and they wont have a choice. Consumer demand for XP preinstalled on systems is still strong and given the compatibility and performance problems of Vista on SOME systems this move is probably a little premature on Microsoft's part. That isn't going to stop them.
I'm all for Vista, I think it is a nice step forward and believe it or not those backwards compatibility issues with programs is a security feature if older apps can't run that means older viruses or spyware can't run in some cases, I've also noticed lower infection rates across the board on Vista at least for the short few months it has been out.
What will keep most people away from Vista are the hardware requirements. Most consumers will have no choice but to buy a completely new system if they want the full Vista experience and that should include a dedicated graphics card, dual core processor and 1GB to 2GB of memory (laptop or desktop) when buying a computer with Vista.

Read more »

Creating a Torrent file using uTorrent

By now, you have surely heard of, and probably used, torrent files. While you may know how to use them for downloading distributed content, did you know that you can use uTorrent to create your own torrent file for sharing your content?
1. Open uTorrent.
2. Go to the menu, click File and select Create New Torrent.
3. Once the new window appears, go to the Select Source section and click either the Add file or Add directory button, depending on what your need is. Browse to the desired file or directory, select it, and click the Open button.
4. If you know your Tracker and Web Seed information, enter them in the Torrent Properties section.
5. Click the Create and save as button and browse to the location that you want the file saved to. Click the Save button.

Read more »

Change XP Boot Screen

Michael asks, Is there any way to get rid of "branding" on a computer? Where computer manufacture advertise there products when you start you computer.
Depending on which computer manufacturer made your computer, you might have a simple splash screen displayed as the BIOS loads or you might be inundated with advertising throughout the entire boot process. These are two separate image locations requiring editing in multiple places and some confidence in your computing skills, as the BIOS option can potentially damage your system if done incorrectly.
Changing the Windows Boot Screen
I'll start with the Windows boot screen, since that's fairly easy and doesn't necessarily require any direct modification of system files. There are several ways to approach changing the boot screen. One option is to eliminate it completely, opting to display a blank screen until Windows completes the boot process. To turn off the boot logo, Click Start > Run and type MSCONFIG in the run dialog box to launch the System Configuration Utility. On the BOOT.INI tab, check the box next to /NOGUIBOOT and click OK. The next time you reboot your computer, you'll see the BIOS screen and then nothing until Windows loads completely. The downside to this option is you won't get any feedback if your PC gets hung up somewhere in the boot process.
Image



To maintain a more visual boot process, while also eliminating any boot branding, you might simply want to replace the boot image. The easy way to do this is to download a freeware app from WinCustomize called BootSkin. The app automatically overrides the default Windows boot screen, replacing it with one of the many options in the WinCustomize BootSkin library. With some practice you can make your own custom BootSkin as well.
Image
Download BootSkin
If you want to get really geeky, a third option is to edit the operating system file where the boot screen information resides. You need to be careful in doing this or you can end up with a computer that won't boot. The first part of the process is to create or find an image you want to use. If your computer simply has the all black Windows XP boot screen, with the XP logo like the one pictured below, you don't need a very large image.
Image
Simply create a 215x147 .bmp file with 16 colors (NOT 16-bit) in any image editor and you've got a working replacement. If your computer manufacturer overrides this default screen with something else, you may need to get creative to eliminate all the branding. In general, using a black background looks more consistent, but you can use any of the 16 colors in your palette.
With your new image created, you need a freeware app called Resource Hacker to make some changes.
Before proceeding, locate ntoskrnl.exe in your Windows > system32 folder. Make a copy of the file called newntoskrnl.exe or something equally easy to remember and leave the copy in the system32 folder.
Make a second copy of the ntoskrnl.exe on your desktop (this is the one you will edit).
Open ntoskrnl.exe in Resource Hacker. Expand Bitmap > 5 and highlight the 1033 folder. Right-click the 1033 icon and choose Replace Resource.
Image
Click the Open file with new bitmap button and locate the image you created earlier. Click the Replace button. Save and exit Resource Hacker. You can optionally replace all elements of the boot screen by editing each portion of the Bitmap.
Image
Reboot into SafeMode and copy your newly created ntoskrnl.exe file into the Windows > system32 folder.
Note: If you are using Windows 2000, you can simply replace the image in the Bitmap > 1 > 1033 location with a 640x480 16 color Bitmap to modify the Win2k boot screen in a similar fashion.
Changing the BIOS Splash Screen
To eliminate the branded splash screen associated with your BIOS, you need to obtain the firmware update for your BIOS and edit the logo file that's part of the BIOS fileset before applying the update. Since every computer model and manufacturer uses a slightly different BIOS configuration, it's important to get the BIOS specific to your computer from the support section of the manufacturer's Website. In some cases, like my HP laptop, it's become virtually impossible to replace the logo because the BIOS flash process is contained in an .exe file that runs locally in Windows rather than from a separate disk.
Assuming your PC manufacturer has you create a floppy designed to flash the PC bios, you can fairly easily make a change to the logo displayed. In following the directions to create the BIOS boot disk, simply replace the included logo.bmp file in the BIOS update package with a logo.bmp file created by you. The key here is to use a 16 color (NOT 16-bit color) 640x480 BMP file. Copy your logo.bmp file onto the disk used for your BIOS update and run the bundled logo.bat file by double-clicking it. This converts the logo.bmp to a format ready for the BIOS update.
It's vital to keep all the files in the BIOS update named exactly as they were or your computer may not work after the update. Any changes made to BIOS update files should be done at your own risk and with extreme care.

Read more »

Win XP: Restricting Logon Access

If you work in a multiuser computing environment, and you have full (administrator level) access to your computer, you might want to restrict unauthorized access to your "sensitive" files under Windows 95/98.
One way is to disable the Cancel button in the Logon dialog box.
Just run Regedit and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Network/Logon

Create the "Logon" subkey if it is not present on your machine: highlight the Network key -> right-click in the left hand Regedit pane -> select New -> Key -> name it "Logon" (no quotes) -> press Enter. Then add/modify a DWORD value and call it "MustBeValidated" (don't type the quotes). Double-click it, check the Decimal box and type 1 for value.
Now click the Start button -> Shut Down (Log off U

Read more »

Win XP: How to make your Desktop Icons Transparent

Go to control Panel > System, > Advanced > Performance area > Settings button Visual Effects tab "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the Desktop"

Read more »

How to Accelerate Windows XP File Searches

There is one of the most important features of Vista (or Windows 7) that put Windows XP to shame – File Searches.
With Vista, you can search your files faster, because Vista indexed your entire computer file and its characteristic into database (it traverse all the directories first while you’re doing other things). But with Windows XP, the file search tool traverse all the directory at the same time when you are looking for a specific file, and it did it each time you searching for the same file and this make the process slow.
Fortunately, there are many alternative exist to accelerate Windows XP file searches. Two of my recommendation is to use Copernic Desktop Search or Google Desktop. Both tools has capability to index your e-mail messages, documents, MP3 files, images, and other content for lightning-fast searches. Besides that, it also let you quick look inside found files without opening them. That’s what we can call a good search tool!

Read more »

Renaming the Win XP Start Menu Button

Are you bored of having the name “start”? If so now you can rename your start menu button to give the name of your choice.

BYPASSING WINDOWS FILE PROTECTION
1.Launch My Computer,click tools,folder options,then view

2.Select show all hidden files and folders option and uncheck the option hide
protected operating system files,unckeck hide extension for known file types
3.Open C:\windows\system32\restore,select the file filelist.xml,right click it go to properties and uncheck read-only
4.Open it(filelist.xml) with notepad
5.Add the line %systemroot%\explorer.exe as shown below

%systemroot%\explorer.exe
%windir%\system.ini
%windir%\tasks\desktop.ini
%windir%\win.ini
*:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
*:\CONFIG.MSI
*:\CONFIG.SYS
6.Save the file
7.Open C:\windows\system32\dllcache,you will find a backup copy of explorer.exe. Rename it to explorer.bak.
CHANGING THE NAME OF START BUTTON
1.Open Resource Hacker,open C:\windows\explorer.exe
2.Expand string,expand 37,click on 1033
3.On right side rename “start” to anything you want EG.”anything” and press compile script
4.Repeat the same procedure for string,38,1033
5.Save changes in file menu(if error occurs close explorer.exe and repeat sub-step 3 & 4
6.Press ctrl+alt+del in processes tab of task manager endtask explorer.exe
7.Again in new task open C:\windows\explorer.exe you will see that start menu is renamed
8.Close task manager and ENJOY!!!!

Read more »

What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?

You are no doubt reading this article because you are wondering why on earth there are nearly a dozen processes running with the name svchost.exe. You can't kill them, and you don't remember starting them… so what are they?
So What Is It?
According to Microsoft: "svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries". Could we have that in english please?
Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective this makes more sense for reusability… but the problem is that you can't launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (.exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born.
Why Are There So Many svchost.exes Running?
If you've ever taken a look at the Services section in control panel you might notice that there are a Lot of services required by Windows. If every single service ran under a single svchost.exe instance, a failure in one might bring down all of Windows… so they are separated out.
Those services are organized into logical groups, and then a single svchost.exe instance is created for each group. For instance, one svchost.exe instance runs the 3 services related to the firewall. Another svchost.exe instance might run all the services related to the user interface, and so on.
So What Can I Do About It?
You can trim down unneeded services by disabling or stopping the services that don't absolutely need to be running. Additionally, if you are noticing very heavy CPU usage on a single svchost.exe instance you can restart the services running under that instance.
The biggest problem is identifying what services are being run on a particular svchost.exe instance… we'll cover that below.
If you are curious what we're talking about, just open up Task Manager and check the "Show processes from all users" box:
Checking From the Command Line (Vista or XP Pro)
If you want to see what services are being hosted by a particular svchost.exe instance, you can use the tasklist command from the command prompt in order to see the list of services.

tasklist /SVC

The problem with using the command line method is that you don't necessarily know what these cryptic names refer to.
Checking in Task Manager in Vista
You can right-click on a particular svchost.exe process, and then choose the "Go to Service" option.
This will flip over to the Services tab, where the services running under that svchost.exe process will be selected:
The great thing about doing it this way is that you can see the real name under the Description column, so you can choose to disable the service if you don't want it running.
Using Process Explorer in Vista or XP
You can use the excellent Process Explorer utility from Microsoft/Sysinternals to see what services are running as a part of a svchost.exe process.
Hovering your mouse over one of the processes will show you a popup list of all the services:
Or you can double-click on a svchost.exe instance and select the Services tab, where you can choose to stop one of the services if you choose.
Disabling Services
Open up Services from the administrative tools section of Control Panel, or type services.msc into the start menu search or run box.
Find the service in the list that you'd like to disable, and either double-click on it or right-click and choose Properties.
Change the Startup Type to Disabled, and then click the Stop button to immediately stop it.
You could also use the command prompt to disable the service if you choose. In this command "trkwks" is the Service name from the above dialog, but if you go back to the tasklist command at the beginning of this article you'll notice you can find it there as well.

sc config trkwks start= disabled

Hopefully this helps somebody!

Read more »