An unattended Windows XP/2003 install can install all your software and settings along with Windows, and without you having to click a button or press a key,completely automated. Learn how over here:

http://unattended.msfn.org

Windows CD would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings. And have it merged with the latest Service Pack to save time? Followed by silently installing all your favorite applications along with DirectX 9.0c, .Net Framework 1.1 and then all the required hotfixes, updated drivers, tweaks, and a readily patched UXTheme without any user interaction whatsoever? Then this guide will show you how you can do just that!

Through the course of this guide, you will create a CD that does all the installing for you. The CD will be fully updated with the latest hot fixes, and install all your programs for you.

Many apply a registry tweak to have notepad as an option for unknown file types. We frequently see such files which are actually just text, but named with some odd file-extension. And then, some suspicious files which we want to make sure what the contents are. Well, in such cases where the registry tweak is applied, the downside happens to be that even some known files get associated with notepad – but no, all we want is to be able to open a file with notepad – the association part in such cases is unwanted interference. Also, notepad becomes a permanent fixture on the right-click menu – which is again an annoyance.

So what we do, is to have notepad as an option in the Send-To options, of the right-click menu in explorer. It fulfils the purpose to perfection (atleast, in my case). Here’s what we do:

1. right-click desktop, choose “New >> Shortcut”
2. Type the location of the item – “notepad” – (that’s all, no need to give path)
3. Next >> type name for shortcut – “Edit with Notepad”
4. Click finish
5. Now right-click this shortcut on the desktop, and choose properties.
6. Confirm that the “target” and “start in” fields are using variables – “%windir%\system32\notepad.exe” – (absolute paths will be problematic if you use this .LNK on machines other than your own)
7. Now, browse to “%UserProfile%\SendTo” in explorer (which means “C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name\SendTo\” folder)
8. And copy the “Edit with Notepad.lnk” file which you already created, to that folder.
9. So now, you can right-click on ANY file-type, and be offered an option to open with notepad, from the SendTo sub-menu.

So now, you just right-click on an .nfo or .eml or .diz file (which are associated with other programs, and are sometimes just plain-text files), and choose “Send To >> Edit with Notepad” and it will open in notepad!
No more botheration of applying registry tweaks for something as simple as this.

Yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more?

That’s the beauty of this program being open source.
Here’s what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly – and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections – I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining… lol… you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settins and put in the numbers below – for the true / false booleans – they’ll change when you double click.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband – it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now!