Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

Have you experience using a computer then suddenly a blue screen appears with various texts, including a sentence that says physical dumping of memory.. and such? This error only appears at computers running in a Windows environment. Tech people usually call this the “BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH” because when the error occurs, the display will turn blue, the PC will freeze and will require rebooting. Making you lose any unsaved work. Your PC could be suffering from RAM problems or registry errors.

 

Prescription:

-          For the employees who are working in a company, call your IT support. They work great on these.

-          Run a full scan to check for any conflicts in your PC. Corruption of your registry is a possible reason.

-          Regular defragging and reformatting can also help in preventing this from occurring.

-          You might want to try to use a tool called ‘registry cleaner’ to go through your system and fix all the problems that are in there.

-          For individuals at home, before taking you computer to the computer technician, take note of the texts on the screen and browse the Net for other possible solutions.

Speed up the Start Menu

1. The default speed of the Start Menu is pretty slow, but you can fix that by editing a Registry Key. Fire up the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay By default, the value is 400. Change this to a smaller value, such as 0, to speed it up.

2. If your confounded by the slow speed of the Start Menu, even after using the tip above, then you might try the following: Navigate to Display Properties then Appearance then Advanced and turn off the option titled Show menu shadow . You will get much better overall performance.

Activate your Screensaver in a click

1. Click the Start button, click Search.
2. In the Search Window, click All file types.
3. Then type *.scr in the search input
4. Check Local Hard Drives. ( Drive C or the drive where you have system files stored on your computer)
5. Click Search.
6. You will see a list of screensavers in the results. Pick a screensaver you want. You can preview it by double-clicking it.
7. Right click on the file, choose Send To, and then click Desktop (create shortcut).
8. To activate the screensaver, double-click the icon on your desktop

Enabling Administrator Account in XP Welcome Screen

1. To get Admin account on the “Welcome Screen”, Press “ctrl-alt-del” twice. a standard windows interface will popup enables you to enter your username and password.

2. Just type in the username: Administrator password: none ( This will still work if the administrator account is not being passworded/edited/customize)

3. You should have logged in to the Administrator account now.

note: In step2, If you wanted to go back to  the XP welcome screen, just press escape button.

Common Command Console Utilities

WindowsXP comes with quite a few console utilities you can easily run from the command line:

Computer Management – compmgmt.msc
Disk Managment – diskmgmt.msc
Device Manager – devmgmt.msc
Disk Defrag – dfrg.msc
Event Viewer – eventvwr.msc
Shared Folders – fsmgmt.msc
Group Policies – gpedit.msc
Local Users and Groups – lusrmgr.msc
Performance Monitor – perfmon.msc
Resultant Set of Policies – rsop.msc
Local Security Settings – secpol.msc
Services – services.msc
Component Services – comexp.msc