Whether you’re a fan of the new Control Panel or not, there’s a lot you can do to make it more palatable—like hiding applets you never use, re-categorizing the ones you do use, and displaying all applets in a simple-to-use cascading menu.

When I first started using XP, one of the things that annoyed me most was its new Control Panel. Yes, the big new icons for running applets are certainly pretty, but the Control Panel’s several-layer organization forces you to click far too many times in order to get to the applet that you want. And its clutter of applets that I rarely if ever use make it even more difficult and confusing.

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If there is more than one user account on your system, or if you’ve set up XP to require logins, you’ll have to log in to XP before you can begin to use it. But you needn’t stay with the default XP login rules; you can use a single Registry key to customize how you log in. For example, you can display custom text before login, and you can remind anyone with an account on the PC to change their password a certain number of days prior to the password’s expiration.

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When you shut down Windows, XP gives each process, service or application 20 seconds to close before the operating system turns off the computer. If the process, service, or application doesn’t shut down within 20 seconds, a dialog box appears, prompting you to either wait 20 more seconds, immediately end the process, service, or application, or cancel shutdown.

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If you constantly see an error message that you can’t get rid of—for example, from a piece of software that didn’t uninstall properly and continues to give errors on startup—you can disable it from displaying on startup. Run the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows. (This key holds a variety of Windows system settings, such as the location of your system directory.) Create a new DWORD called NoPopupsOnBoot and give it a value of 1. Exit the Registry and reboot for the setting to take effect. To disable it, either delete the DWORD value or give it a value of 0.

 When you start your PC, Num Lock, Scroll Lock, and Caps Lock don’t automatically toggle on. You can automatically turn each of them on or off whenever your PC starts, for all accounts on the PC. As a practical matter, most people probably want to have only Num Lock automatically turned on, but this Registry hack gives you the power to force any combination of keys on or off. Run the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Keyboard. Find the String value InitialKeyboardIndicators. By default, it is set to 0, which means that Num Lock, Scroll Lock, and Caps Lock are all turned off. Set it to any of the following values, depending on the combination of keys you want turned on or off:

0

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It’s not only startup times that you’d like to speed up; you can also make sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can take to speed up the shutdown process:

Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown

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There’s another way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster.

On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it may not be on yours, or it may have been changed inadvertently. To make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the Registry Editor and go to:

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AOL expanded to India on Thursday with its first portal targeting Asia’s growing online population. Although AOL has been dropping its Internet access businesses around the world, it has been making a bigger push at delivering content through free Web sites in hopes of boosting advertising opportunities. AOL expanded its portal audiences in Europe as part of deals to sell off its access businesses there.

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