10 Mar 2012

Make Pictures Smaller Unavailable

When you try and send pictures through e-mail, you should normally be given the option to make them smaller.
If this option is not available, a DLL file may need to be registered.
  1. Start
  2. Run
  3. regsvr32 shimgvw.dll

Creating a Suspend Shortcut

If you would like to create an icon to suspend your computer,
  1. Right click on the Desktop
  2. New / Shortcut
  3. Enter in rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState
  4. Give it whatever name you want
  5. Now when you click on that shortcut, your computer will shutdown and suspend

Viewing Your IP Address Information

There are several ways you can determine your IP address information:
IPCONFIG
  1. Start / Run / cmd
  2. IPCONFIG /ALL
This opens a command window. One advantage is that you can send the information to a text file (IPCONFIG /ALL > c:\ip.txt)
But sometimes the window shows show much information you need to scroll around to fine it.
VIEW STATUS
  1. Control Panel / Network Connections / Double click the icons for your network (If the network has an icon in the system tray you can also just double click on that icon)
  2. Click on the Support tab
  3. Click on the Details button

Additional Utilities

On the XP CD in the \Support\Tools directory, there are a lot of additional support and troubleshooting utilities.
You can run SETUP from that directory to install them.
Just a few are:
diruse Shows Disk Usage
dupfinder Finds Duplicate files
getmac Get's MAC address of the network card
hostname Shows the host name of the computer
netdiag Diagnoses a variety of network components
pviewer Show a list of process and allows you to get a memory detail or kill any process
windiff Compare files and directories

Editing the Boot.ini file

The boot.ini file is a simple text file that is on the root of the boot drive.
You can edit this with any plain text editor like Notepad (may need to unhide the file first)
  1. Right click on My Computer
  2. Select Properties
  3. Click on the Advanced tab
  4. Under Startup and Recovery, click on the Settings button
  5. Click on the Edit button

Opening Shared Folders Snap-In

To manage all your shared folders, you can run the snap-in directly
Start / Run / fsmgmt.msc
This will show you all your shared folders in a single window
You can also see what other computers are connected and what files they have open

Windows Help and Support Error

If you get an error Windows cannot find HELPCTR.EXE, it may be that a registry entry has gotten corrupted.
  1. Start Regedit
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\HELPCTR.EXE
  3. If the key isn't there, right click and create a new key HELPCTR.EXE
  4. It should have a value of C:\WINDOWS\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\HelpCtr.exe
  5. Reboot

Speeding Up Network Browsing

There are a lot of things which can negatively impact how fast XP will browse network shares.
One has been previously covered regarding browsing to Win9x computers.
Other things you can try, especially when there is slow browsing to network shares with a lot of files:
1. Remove current shortcuts in My Network Places
2. Change the registry so shared folders on remote computers are not automatically added to My Network Places when you even open a document from that shared folder
  1. Start Regedit
  2. Create a DWORD value:
  3. HKEY_Current_User \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer \ NoRecentDocsNetHood to 1.
  4. I have also seen setting the following help as well.
    HKEY_Current_User \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer \ UseDesktopIniCache to 1.
Download Reg file to do both
3. Increase the amount of data is buffered at one time to send to a client. On the computer with the shared directory:
  1. Start Regedit
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
  3. Create a DWORD Key called SizReqBuf
  4. Give it a value of Hex FFFF
Download Reg file