Posts Tagged ‘xp’

Disable Windows XP’s Startup and Shutdown Sounds

We’re going to show you how to easily disable Windows XP’s startup and shut down sounds, and optionally, any other sounds that Windows makes when you perform an action. You can also use these settings to change the sounds associated with start up and shut down.

Head over to Control Panel, head over to Sounds and Audio Devices, and hit the Sounds tab. Scroll down to either Start Windows or Exit Windows and select [None] from the option menu. That’s it!

Move My Documents to a Separate Partition

(XP only) - We’re going to be using TweakUI to move My Documents to a separate partition (similar to setting Linux’s /home on a separate partition). In this tutorial, we’re going to be moving our own important contents of My Documents to the new partition (we’re not setting up our new partition as My Documents as unwanted folders tend to build up there - but this tutorial can easily be adapted to set the partition as My Documents).

For what reasons? Easier backup of files, and an easy to access collection of your files, not the odd unwanted folders that tend to pop up (EA Games, Battlefield 2, My Stationary, My Google Gadgets, etc.). We’re going to assume you have a new NTFS partition setup already. (more…)

Get Rid of Arrows on Shortcuts

Using TweakUI, you can get rid of the little arrow icons on your shortcuts:

We’ll assume you have TweakUI installed. Head to Explorer and click Shortcut. Pick an option (for the purposes of this tutorial we chose None) and hit OK.

Windows Vista Features for XP

The latest version of Windows, Mojave Vista, is often criticized by others for being slow and having too many unnecessary features. We’re going to show you how to get several of Vista’s major features on XP - for free.

We’re going to also be including a list at the end of minor features touted by Vista, and XP alternatives. (more…)

Master iTunes with XP’s Speech Recognition

As a follow up to our post on getting speech recognition for Windows XP (and 98, 2000), we’ve decided to write a series of tutorials on controlling your applications with it (The speech recognition is not as full featured as in Vista and therefore can’t handle much more than basic commands).

This collection of tips will focus on controlling iTunes (playback). We’ll be focusing on switching songs, and general play/pause and next track (we’re still working on getting previous to work).

Please note that I have Shuffle on for all of these tips. Also note that iTunes must be the active window for any of these to work. (more…)

Speech Recognition for Chinese and Japanese

Using a file from Microsoft’s Speech SDK, we can install both Japanese and Chinese speech recognition engines into Windows. This serves as a follow up to our previous post on getting speech recognition for free in Windows XP. Head over to the Microsoft Speech SDK download page and download the SpeechSDK51LangPack.exe. (more…)

Speech Recognition for XP

One of the features included with Windows Vista was speech recognition, a supposed feature that would revolutionize how we use computers:

We totally believe speech recognition will go mainstream somewhere over the next decade.

- Bill Gates, Sept. 2005 (view more quotes here)

This tutorial will show you how to install speech recognition for XP using the Microsoft Speech SDK. If you’ve got a copy of Office XP or 2003 handy, please follow this tutorial on Microsoft’s website.

For everyone else, please download the Microsoft Speech SDK here (see picture above for correct file). (more…)

More Webapps on the Desktop

As a follow-up to embedding Remember the Milk on the desktop, we’ve compiled a list of some more web apps you can embed. (more…)

Enabling File Extensions in Windows

Quick tip — while most people know how to do this, enabling file extensions for known file types is suggested, as Windows XP and up (stupidly) decide to hide file extensions for known file types by default.

Open a Windows Explorer window (Start → My Documents works well) and click Tools then Folder Options…

Click the View tab at the top. Scroll down in the Advanced Settings list until you find Hide extensions for known file types. Make sure it is unchecked, then click OK.

Installing Custom Themes on Windows XP

The blue Windows XP theme gets boring. As does the silver and olive green one. As does the Zune one you downloaded from Microsoft. This tutorial will explain how to install a custom Windows theme. For this tutorial, you must have a patched UXTheme.dll. We’ll be installing a nice areao4.2 theme we found on DeviantArt. Your desktop will end up looking like the one to the left (or should come close). (more…)