Make Control Panel Applets More Accessible

Windows 95 and above.
When you open the Control Panel, you are presented with a few dozen icons allowing you to control many aspects of the Windows environment. Here is a tip that not only makes these Control Panel Applets more quickly accessible, but allows you exclude the ones you don't want, and add your own custom icons:

• Open Control Panel and Explorer.
• Make a new folder directly underneath the Start Menu called "Control Panel".
• Select some or all of the icons in Control Panel, and drag them into this new folder.
• Windows will make a shortcut to each icon you drop into the folder, forming a new menu right off the Start Menu.
• Not only can you rename or remove any of the entries you wish, but you can add non-Control Panel items to the list, such as the Volume Control and Dial-up Networking (which should have been in the Control Panel in the first place).

Go Directly to Device Manager
Windows 2000/XP
You can add an item in your new Control panel folder by creating a shortcut to the file devmgmt.msc
------------------------------------------------------------------

Go Directly to Services Manager
Windows 2000/XP
You can add an item in your new Control panel folder by creating a shortcut to the file services.msc
------------------------------------------------------------------

Enable Installation of Desktop Items
Windows 2000/I.E.6
If you are running I.E.6 and your right click taskbar & Start Button context menu and Quick Launch bars disappear try this before you try anything else. In I.E.6/Tools/Internet Options/ Security Panel/Internet Customize Level/Installation of Desktop Items/Enable.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Windows Keys
I've posted these before, but they are worth listing again.

• Windows: Display the Start menu
• Windows + D: Minimize or restore all windows
• Windows + E: Display Windows Explorer
• Windows + F: Display Search for files
• Windows + Ctrl + F: Display Search for computer
• Windows + F1: Display Help and Support Center
• Windows + R: Display Run dialog box
• Windows + break: Display System Properties dialog box
• Windows + shift + M: Undo minimize all windows
• Windows + L: Lock the workstation
• Windows + U: Open Utility Manager

Heap Compaction
"This is the process also known (although improperly) as memory defragmentation, and has been used with Win9x for some time. The process is of questionable benefit to Windows 2000, because it manages its memory in an entirely different way than Win9x does, but the information could be useful nonetheless. What is actually occurring when one 'defragments' the system memory is a dumping of main memory to the page file, forcing the computer to reload all of the active information into memory. In computing terms, this is called Heap Compaction, or Garbage Collection. You can use a small, Visual Basic program to perform this action. Simply open up a new file in notepad, input the line Mystring = Space(16000000), and save the file with the .vbs extension. Assuming you have the Visual Basic runtime libraries installed on your computer (they're installed by default by Win2k), when you execute this file it will flush the system memory. This is particularly useful after running a program with a known memory leak - it can be used to discard the leaked space and allow other programs to use that portion of memory again. If you have a large amount of system memory, you may wish to consider using a higher number within the brackets of the visual basic script - I have tested values up to 80000000 without any problems on my system. Using a higher number should more effectively purge the system memory of leaked space."

Taken from Ars Technica: Windows 2000 Memory Subsystem Tweaking - Page 2

------------------------------------------------------------------

Speed-up Internet

"Try this - need feed back if you run bog standard machine with either OS.

Log on as Admin, and go to services and 'stop' and then 'disable' DNS Client server.

You will find EVERYTHING speeds up.

When I stumbled on this, my first thoughts were about 'how does the machine resolve anything, then?'. Wrong!

All that service does is effectively run a cache DNS on your local machine... so every query, every page, every dam thing you do it tries to resolve - your ISP DNS (or whatever) specified in the Network settings handle the system/app resolution anyway." (from a post at Nonags.com)
------------------------------------------------------------------