Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Making your computer power off when it is shut down

Do you have problems with your computer not shutting down when you power it off? You may need to make an edit to the registry to get the computer to power off when you select Shutdown. Try this:


Open your favorite registry editor.
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
In the right pane, double click the item named PowerOffActive.
In the value data box, give it a value of 1. Note that this should cause the power to go off at shutdown, but it only applies to the user account that's logged on when you make the change. If you want to make it apply to all users, substitute the following key in step 2: HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop.

Disable display of status messages

If you don't want your XP computer to display the logon, logoff, startup and shutdown status messages, you can turn them off by editing the registry. First be sure to back it up, then perform these steps:

Open your favorite registry editor.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ policies \ system
Right click in an empty space in the right pane, select New and select DWORD value.
Name the new value DisableStatusMessages.
Double click the value and give it a value of 1.

Hide your XP computer from Network Neighborhood

Have you ever wanted to create shared folders on your XP computer so that some folks on the network can access your data, but you don't want the shares to show up in the Network Neighborhood because there are others on the network you don't want to see them?

It's easy to accomplish that.
Click Start Run.
In the Run box, type cmd to open a command prompt window.
At the command prompt, type net config server /hidden:yes