Removing unused device drivers from XP machines

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box.
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.
6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.
7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices.
8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.
9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

Common Control Panel Applets

The following are some common Control Panel Applets that are located in the \windows\system32 directory. If you find yourself using any of these frequently, then you can simply make shortcuts to them on your desktop.

appwiz.cpl ---> Add/Remove Programs 
desk.cpl ---> Display Properties
firewall.cpl ---> Firewall Settings
inetcpl.cpl ---> Internet Options
mmsys.cpl ---> Sound and Audio
ncpa.cpl ---> Network Connections
nusrmgr.cpl ---> User Accounts
powercfg.cpl ---> Power Options
sysdm.cpl ---> System Properties
wscui.cpl ---> Security Center
wuaucpl.cpl ---> Automatic Updates Configuration

Identify Faulty Device Drivers

If you are having problems with lockups, blue screens, or can only get to safe mode, often the problem is due to a faulty device driver. One way to help identify them is through the use of the Verfier program

1. Start / Run / Verifier
2. Keep the default of Create Standard Settings
3. Select the type of drivers you want to confirm
4. A list of drivers to be verified on the next boot will be shown
5. Reboot
6. If your computer stops with a blue screen, you should get an error message with the problem driver
7. To turn off the Verifier, run verifier /reset
   

Changing the User Type

Normally in XP Pro, through the Control Panel / User Accounts icon, you are only allowed to create administrators or limited users. If you want to create more types of accounts

1. Right click on My Computer
2. Manage
3. Local Users and Groups
4. Users
5. Right click on the user you want to change
6. Properties
7. Member of tab
8. Add button
9. Advanced button
10. Find Now button
    

From here you see the full list of possibilities (e.g. Power User, Backup Operator etc.)

Additional Utilities

On the XP CD in the \Support\Tools directory, there are a lot of additional support and troubleshooting utilities. You can run SETUP from that directory to install them.

Just a few are:

diruse ---> Shows Disk Usage
dupfinder ---> Finds Duplicate files
getmac ---> Get's MAC address of the network card
hostname ---> Shows the host name of the computer
netdiag ---> Diagnoses a variety of network components
pviewer ---> Show a list of process & allows you to get a memory detail or kill any process
windiff ---> Compare files and directories

Formatting a Partition Greater than 32 GIGs with FAT32

WindowsXP will only format a partition greater than 32 GIGs as NTFS. If you want to format it with FAT32, you can use a regular Win98 Boot disk and use that version of FDISK to create the partition (with Large Hard Drive Support)

Reboot with the same boot disk and format

WindowsXP will then be able to use the partition with no problems