Remap your keyboard

Todays keyboards have many legacy keys that are of little or no use. Take for example the scroll-lock key or the caps lock key. It is possible to remap the keyboard keys with SharpKeys.

Sharpkeys is a very small utility that allows you to remap any key on your keyboard to another key. It does not stay resident in memory, instead it writes to the registry and then you can just exit it.

The only downside is that you have to reboot your system.

Disabling Autorun in Windows XP

Many of the common viruses, nowadays, transmit themselves using usb-drives. One thing required to protect from getting infected as soon as you plug in an infected usb-drive/CD is to disable the autorun feature.

You will need to run the following reg file to disable it:
http://ali.jan.googlepages.com/noautorun.reg

Faster Windows XP Boot

The single thing you can do to drastically decrease Windows XP startup times is to download TuneXP and then select Ultra fast booting option as shown below. Wait for some time as it rearranges the boot file and then a command window will open p to de-fragment the files. Wait till it's gone and then restart your computer. Feel the difference!

Faster Windows Shutdown

If you are getting bogged down by long windows shutdown times, you can do some registry edits to get this process snappier. Details can be found in this CNet Article.

However, in short you need to do the following registry entries:









To make things easier, you can download and double click on this reg file that I have created to do those entries.

In addition to this, you need Microsoft User Profile Hive Service installed. This link however was not working, so you can try the one below:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/uphcservice.html

This will make your system shutdown noticeably faster.

Next time: How to drastically improve startup times.