Better Mouse Control in Games with
WinXP:
WindowsXP is a great OS, but one
problem I find that bugs the hell out of me is Mouse Acceleration. It's
especially irritating when I play FPS games. Luckily there's a simple fix for
this. Click the Start Button, go to Run and type Regedit
.
>From there go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Control Panel
-> Mouse folder. Find the SmoothMouseXCurve: and SmoothMouseYCurve: binary
value's. Here under the binary SmoothMouseXCurve you'll want to change your
value's to look like this...
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 a0 00 00 00 00 00 00
00
40 01 00 00 00 00 00
00 80 02 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 05 00 00 00 00
00
And change the "SmoothMouseYCurve" values to
this...
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
66 a6 02 00 00 00 00 00
cd 4c 05 00 00
00 00 00
a0 99 0a 00 00 00 00 00
38 33 15 00 00 00 00 00
After
making those changes, reboot your computer. Now load up your favorite FPS game
and you should notice you can 'frag' a lot easier!
Shift/Administrator:
Most programs require
administrative access to install, however if the current user which is logged on
the computer has work in progress it may not be possible to log off and log back
on as the admin. Never fear though, Microsoft thought of this already and there
is a little hidden trick that solves this problem.
If you need to access a program that requires
administrative rights, simply press the "Shift" key and right click on the
program file. You will now see the "Run as..." option and when you select that,
it'll prompt you for a user name and password. Simply enter the administrator
name and password and now you can run that program as the Admin. Administrative
rights will only be enabled for that program alone, and once it has been closed
admin access will be terminated.
This works in both Win2k as well as WinXP and can even be
used on programs in the Start Menu.
WinXP System Restore, the hog:
While I don't use the System Restore feature of WindowsXP
myself, on my parents and sisters computers I do enable it because it can very
useful if they toast the OS. The big problem with System Restore is that it can
take up a lot of storage space! Luckily there's a simple fix for this and you
can clean up your HDD quite easily.
Go to the "Disk Cleanup" program in your "System Tools"
directory (Start -> Programs -> Accessories). If you have more then one
partition or multiple HDD's you'll have to do this procedure a few times, one
time per partition/HDD. Click the "More Options" tab and the last box in that
window should say "System Restore". Click the "Clean Up" button and XP will
remove all but the latest restore point. Obviously only do this if your system
is running properly.
When I did this for my sister, it freed up 4GB worth of
HDD space and her XP installation is only about a year old! So if you're running
out of space on your hard drive, just remove the old restore points!
=)
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