Place Favorites Menu in Start Bar

Here's a quick tip which saves you a step or two in opening your web browser to commonly used web sites. To do this:

1.) Right click on the start button and choose "properties" then hit the "customize" button.
2.) Choose the "advanced" tab and scroll down the "start menu items" box until you reach the "favorites menu" option.
3.) Check it to add your IE favorites list to the start menu as a new tree.

Quicker Access to Control Panel in XP

For quicker access to the Windows XP control panel's assortment of applications, you can set the control panel to appear as a submenu in the start menu, similar to the existing "accessories" submenu.To do this:

1.) Right click on the "start" button and choose "properties".
2.) Select the "customize" button to the right of the "start menu" option.
3.) Choose the "advanced" tab and then in the "start menu items" box.
4.) Find "control panel" and select the "display as menu" option.

Now when you go to the start menu you will notice that "Control Panel"
opens up into a bigger menu with all of the same options that you can find inside the Control Panel folder.

Disabling the Office Clipboard Side Window

By default, upon copying and pasting multiple items in Office 2000+, Office will automatically display an extended version of the Windows "clipboard" to the right of the screen. Using the registry editor, it is possible to disable this behavior. (Note that disabling this behavior will not remove access to the Office Clipboard, just the default behavior upon multiple copy+pastes) Go to Start -> Run -> regedt32 -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\General and create a new DWORD "AcbControl" set to 1. For the changes to take effect, you must start Office after the registry changes.

No Tabs / Menus in Task Manager

One of the most common annoyances that I hear of all the time from people is some form of a "task manager without buttons." This is sometimes caused by a malicious program, but more often than not, it is caused by simple user error. To "get the buttons back," double-click on any open grey space in the Task Manager, and the buttons will be back. To take them away, double-click any grey space again.

Startup Programs

In order to see what's starting with the rest of your computer, go to Start-->Run and type msconfig in the prompt.  When the new window opens, click on the "Startup" tab and uncheck any items that you don't want starting with the rest of Windows.  It will prompt you to restart and once you do, voila!, you no longer have those useless, memory wasting programs running in the background.

DivX for Video Playback

Sometimes when you download a movie file off of the internet and can’t seem to open it with something such as Windows Media player, you may be missing DivX playback capability.  Usually if the video requires this, you will see a “missing codec” message inside the player.  I have noticed that most of the time if I can’t play a video, I am missing either Quicktime or DivX codecs.  The Divx codec is mainly used due to its compression ability, which is said to shrink MPEG-2/DVD files down to one-tenth of their original size.  The playback software by itself is free, but if you want to create DivX files you are going to need the full package of utilities with a price.  Go download this file and see what advantages it can provide for you.
http://www.divx.com/

More Tips....