Application Secrets

Microsoft Windows XP application Secrets

Defrag

Secret - Hidden Command Line Switch

Instructions - Go to "Start", "Run" and Type defrag c: -b to defragment the Boot and Application Prefetch information.

Notes - Windows XP will run this automatically every three days or so, during system idle periods. BootVis will evoke this when you run the "Optimize System" function. There is no need to manually run this unless you wish to immediately optimize a newly installed application's load time.


IExpress

Secret - Hidden Install Creator

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type iexpress - Source

Notes - IExpress is a technology designed to simplify creation of a setup program. Using the step-by-step IExpress Wizard, you can create self-extracting files that automatically run the setup program contained inside. The setup program can be an .inf file or an executable program. IExpress technology automatically removes the setup files after installation, saving the user time and frustration.


MS-DOS Editor

Secret - Hidden Text Editor

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type edit - Source

Notes - Windows XP comes with another text editor besides Notepad - it's called the MS-DOS Editor, and it's commonly referred to simply as Edit. It has features similar to Notepad, as well as additional features such as the ability to work with multiple text files and change the background and text colors.


Netmeeting

Secret - Hidden Internet Conference Application

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type conf - Source

Notes - Windows XP is the last version of Microsoft Windows to include NetMeeting. NetMeeting delivers a complete Internet conferencing solution for all Windows users with multi-point data conferencing, text chat, whiteboard, and file transfer, as well as point-to-point audio and video.


Notepad

Secret - Create a Log File

Instructions - Launch Notepad, Type .LOG on the first line, and then press Enter to move to the next line. On the File menu, click Save As, type a descriptive name for your file in the File name box, and then click OK. When you next open the file, note that the date and time have been appended to the end of the log, immediately preceding the place where new text can be added. You can use this functionality to automatically add the current date and time to each log entry. - Source


Paint

Secret - Image Trails

Instructions - Open an image and hold down Shift then drag the image around to create an image trail.

Secret - 10x Zoom

Instructions - Open an image and select the magnifying glass icon. Left-Click exactly on the line below the 8x.


Private Character Editor

Secret - Hidden Font Editor

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type eudcedit - Source

Notes - You can use Private Character Editor to create unique letters and logos for your font library.


Windows Chat

Secret - Hidden Windows Chat Program

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type winchat - Source

Notes - You can use Windows Chat on your computer to communicate with someone on another computer. Both computers must be connected to the same network (for example, a local area network [LAN] or the Internet). Also, each computer must be running a similar protocol, such as TCP/IP.


Windows Media Player 5.1

Secret - Hidden Windows Media Player

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type mplay32


Windows Media Player 6.4

Secret - Hidden Windows Media Player

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, type mplayer2 - Source

Notes - Windows Media Player 6.4 (Classic) is installed along with Windows Media Player 7. The only update is that it now supports the latest codecs.

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Game Secrets

FreeCell

Secret - Instant Win

Instructions - Hold down Ctrl + Shift + F10 during game play. Then you will be asked if you want to Abort, Retry or Ignore. Choose Abort, then move any card to instantly win.

Secret - Hidden Game Modes
Instructions - In the "Game" menu choose "Select Game". Enter -1 or -2 to activate the hidden game modes.


Hearts

Secret - Show All Cards

Instructions - Go to Start, Run, Type: 'Regedit', OK. Edit this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Hearts

Right click on the Hearts folder, select New, String Value and name it ZB. Right-click on ZB, select Modify and enter a Value Data of 42, OK and close Regedit. Start Hearts (not Internet Hearts). Once in a game Press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F12 to show all the cards.

Background - This secret is a reference to Douglas Adams' book the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 'ZB' is the initials of the character Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Galactic President. '42' is the answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything.


Minesweeper

Secret - Reveal Mines

Instructions - Minimize or close all running applications. Launch Minesweeper, then type xyzzy. Next hold down either shift key for one second. Now when you move the mouse cursor over a Minesweeper square you will see a tiny white pixel in the top left corner of your desktop screen. This pixel will change to black when your mouse moves over a mine. You may need to change you desktop background to a solid color other then white or black to see the pixel.

Secret - Stop Timer

Instructions - Launch Minesweeper and start a game so the timer starts counting, then press the Windows Key + D to show the desktop. Now when you select minesweeper from the taskbar you can continue playing with the timer stopped.


Pinball

Secret - Extra Balls

Instructions - Type 1max at the start of a new ball to get extra balls.

Secret - Gravity Well

Instructions - Type gmax at the start of a new game to activate the Gravity Well.

Secret - Instant Promotion

Instructions - Type rmax at the start of a new game to go up in ranks.

Secret - Skill Shot

Instructions - Launch the ball partially up the chute past the third yellow light bar so it falls back down to get 75,000 points. There are six yellow light bars that are worth a varying amount of points:

First: 15,000 points
Second: 30,000 points
Third: 75,000 points
Fourth: 30,000 points
Fifth: 15,000 points
Sixth: 7,500 points

Secret - Test Mode

Instructions - Type hidden test at the start of a new ball to activate Test Mode. No notification will be given that this is activated but you can now left-click the mouse button and drag the ball around. While in test mode press the following keys for more secrets:

H - Get a 1,000,000,000 High Score
M - Shows the amount of system memory
R - Increases your rank in game
Y - Shows the Frames/sec rate

Secret - Unlimited Balls

Instructions - Type bmax at the start of a new ball. No notification will be given that this is activated but when a ball is lost a new ball will appear from the yellow wormhole indefinitely. Once this is activated you will be unable to activate other secrets without restarting the game.


Solitaire

Secret - Instant Win

Instructions - Press Alt + Shift + 2 during game play to instantly win.

Secret - Draw single cards in a Draw Three game

Instructions - Hold down CTRL + ALT + SHIFT while drawing a new card. Instead of drawing three cards you will only draw one.

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OS Secrets

Add/Remove

Secret - Hidden Uninstall Options

Instructions - Warning: Proceed at your own risk! Browse to C:\Windows\inf\ and make a backup copy of sysoc.inf. Then open the original file C:\Windows\inf\sysoc.inf in notepad. Go to "Edit" and select "Replace". In "Find what:" type ,hide and in "Replace with:" type , then select "Replace All", save and close the file. Go to the "Control Panel", "Add/Remove", select "Add/Remove Windows Components". You will now see many more Windows components to uninstall. Do not remove anything with no label or that you do not recognize or fully understand what it does. Doing so can break certain functionality in Windows.


Control Panel

Secret - Hidden Control Panel Extensions

Instructions - Download and install TweakUI, launch, go to "Control Panel" and check any item not selected, then "Apply" and "OK". You will now see the hidden control panel extensions.


Device Manager

Secret - Hidden Devices

Instructions - Go to the "Control Panel", "System" icon, "Hardware" tab and select "Device Manager". Select "View" and Show hidden devices.

Secret - Phantom Devices

Instructions - Go to "Start", "Programs", "Accessories" and select "Command Prompt". At the command prompt, type "set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1" and press Enter. At the command prompt, type "start devmgmt.msc" and press Enter. Select "View" and Show hidden devices. You can see devices that are not connected to the computer. - Source

Notes - When you close the command prompt window, Windows clears the "devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1" variable that you set and prevents phantom devices from being displayed when you select "Show hidden devices".


MIDI Files

Secret - Hidden MIDI Files

Instructions - Browse to C:\Windows\Media and you will find 3 hidden MIDI files:

flourish.mid
onestop.mid
town.mid

Notes - "MIDI" stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" - A compression format for encoding music.


Music

Secret - Music from the Installer

Instructions - Browse to C:\Windows\system32\oobe\images\title.wma and play.

Notes - "OOBE" stands for "Out-of-Box Experience".


Shutdown

Secret - Display Hibernate Option on the Shut Down dialog

Instructions - Go to "Start", "Turn Off Computer..." and press either Shift key to change the "Stand By" button to "Hibernate".


Support Tools

Secret - Over 100 Windows XP Support Utilities are on the install CD

Instructions for Pre-SP2 users - If you do not have SP2 installed, put the original Windows XP CD in the CD-ROM Drive, run the D:\Support\Tools\setup.exe file.

Instructions for SP2 users - If you have SP2 installed, Download the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools and install.

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End

This page will be revised as new Secrets are discovered and added. Feel free to submit suggestions or comments to OptimizeXP@comcast.net. Do not send Technical Support Questions.

The following are not secrets, do not submit them:

C:\Windows\clock.avi
C:\Windows\0.log - "0" file

The following are Myths, do not submit them:

'CON' Folder - 'CON' is a reserved file name so is AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN and NUL.
Notepad Phrases - This is an encoding issue, any combination of characters in the same order 4-3-3-5 will cause the same problem.
Telnet Star Wars - No hidden version of Star Wars exists in Windows. These can be viewed online at ASCIIMATION.co.nz

www.OptimizeGuides.com

How to Autoinstall Required Software after a Windows Reinstall

Anyone who has been using Windows for any length of time knows reinstalling it is unavoidable. Some people call technical help and some do it themselves. If you reinstall on your own, you know it takes a little time but the most annoying part of reinstalling Windows is that you have to reinstall all your software one by one all over again. Software like Firefox, Winamp, VLC and other indispensable programs that don’t ship with Windows.

Windows Post-Install Wizard allows you to take care of such situations and automatically install all the software that you would like to install on a fresh install with a minimum of input. There are a few steps involved in getting it to work as we shall see:

• Download and extract the package to a location of your choice.
• Let’s start by adding the applications you need to be installed, post-Windows installation. You must download the applications and save the setup inside the “WPI\Install” folder which can be found under the location where you extracted the contents of the download from step 1.

  

• Now run the WPI.hta file. This will launch a HTML application. Click on the config button to enter the configuration section. This is where we will build the script to install all the software that we require, automatically.
• Click on the ‘add’ button and fill in the appropriate details in the ‘Description’ tag at the bottom. Enter the name, description and install order. UUID gets filled automatically, choose “Default” if you want the current application to be included in the default set of apps available during installation. Choose a category under which the current application should appear, should the user want to choose the applications to install.

  

• Now hop over to the command tab. Click on the “Add” button towards the right. A command section appears at the bottom. Click on the folder icon to browse for the setup file. This will fill in the command section automatically with the required path. Now you need to add any switches that you want to run the installation program with. A common switch used in slipstreamed or unintended installs is the /s or /silent or -quiet switch. This suppresses all questions and proceeds with the default install of the application. You might have to search for the switches available for the particular application that you are working with!

  

• Add in any dependencies, in the ‘Dependencies’ tab. A common example is software that requires the .NET framework. In such cases you would not want to install software that depends on the .NET framework to be installed without the user checking the .NET framework entry first. Such conditions can be specified from within this tab.
• Select ‘Save’, add other applications or choose ‘exit’.

Now that you have configured your script, next comes the task to include it on your Windows installation disc or as a standalone disc that you can run during the installation of the post installation after booting on to the desktop. WPI has plenty of options to help you achieve this, best of which (because its ready made) is the $oem$ folder that you can download from the WPI site and place it on your installation disc. This is the structure we are looking to achieve on your final installation disc:

With this done, use something like nlite, vlite or the MakeISO tool that you can download from the WPI download section to make the disc bootable. Pop it in and sit back and watch your system being configured according to your needs. WPI also offers advanced options you can use to customize the look of the installer and even playback some music while it’s doing its thing!

Since you can run almost any command using WPI, it is also an excellent way to apply some tweaks that you had before formatting and you would like to include in the next install. It is always a good option to check your newly created disc on a virtual machine before you try to go all ballistic and format your computer. You might be able to find a quirk or two and fix them.

You might be also interested in a couple of alternative ways to do the same thing as recommended by other MakeUseOf authors.

- How To Reinstall Windows Without Losing Your Data
- How To Create An Unattended Windows XP Disk

ConvertWorld

The coolest unit converter calculator around. ConvertWorld lets you convert pretty much anything starting from basics like currency (US, EUR, CAD, etc.), weight units (KGs to LBs), and length (KM to Miles) to time zone claculator, data storage units and shoe size converter. There are nearly 40 conversion calculators here (see the full list below). Make sure to bookmark it because sooner or later you’ll need it.

Become a Windows Clipboard Master with ClipGuru

As a blogger and Network Administrator I need to do a lot of copy and pasting. I find myself copying huge scripts, HTML code and sometimes huge amounts of user data. During my day to day activities I need to copy screenshots and add text to show a group of people how to do something.

All this cutting and pasting along with clipping images and URL’s for posts sometimes gets all mixed up.

If I need to go back and review a link I copied earlier, chances are it has been overwritten by some 30 other tasks since. That is where ClipGuru comes in. This is an older freeware program that lets you take charge of your clipboard in ways you never imagined. If you need a powerful clipboard viewer and clipboard recorder app then read on.

Let’s take a look at ClipGuru. We will be using the standalone version (as in not installing it and can be run from a executable). You can grab the same one I did by navigating to here which will start your 387KB download.

When you finish it and run it you will see ClipGuru’s clipboard manager:

Go ahead and copy some stuff from webpages to images and back to text. You can see what I copied below and the Note/Source field on the right is auto-populated. This makes it even easier to see what’s what. I copied some code from the source of Clipguru and ClipGuru sure enough noted it in the correct column. Nice and of course you can go in and edit this field as well.

Now that you have your data captured within ClipGuru you can put it to work for you. You are able to combine selections, search through what has been captured already and edit those notes.

You can get a preview of the image you captured by simply highlighting that row like you see below:

If you captured text or code you can search inside ClipGuru for specific key words like shown below. In this example you will see I selected some HTML code I copied and then I searched within it for the word Clip. It highlights the found results just as you would expect.

According to the ClipGuru website they regularly save your open clipboard sets to prevent data loss. They also speak about false positives this program can give from a firewall product claiming that a keylogger exists. I can vouch for the software being virus/spyware free.

Download Link

Extended Task Manager

Extended Task Manager is like the Windows Task Manager on steroids. It offers a host of information about the current state of the system that the standard Windows task manager doesn’t provide you with.

Here are a few features and additional bits of information that Extended Task Manager offers:

• Displays disk input/output activity with information about related applications.

• Displays network port activity with IP addresses of external computers.

• Displays information about applications that utilized most of the CPU or memory at any time presented on the charts.
• Displays all files locked by a select process.

• Finds all processes locking a specified file.
• Includes “Summary” tab for quickly assessing the overall state of the Windows system.
• Allows freezing individual Windows processes.
• Offers various visual and functional improvements over the standard Windows Task Manager.

Download Link

Create & Resize Windows Partitions with Free PartitionManager

I am an old school network admin and when I first found out I could re-size active hard drive partitions without losing my data back in the late 90’s on a Windows NT machine - I was ecstatic.

Yes I am so old school I remember when it was called The Partition Magician and it was owned by PowerQuest and NOT Symantec who acquired them in 2003.

But any which way PartitionMagic does a great job at pretty much anything Partition related.

Long story short – PartitionMagic, even though it is not still being developed or improved, will cost you around $50 for a legitimate copy.

Yes people do pay for software when they have no other options – but, today I found a little known application (little known to me at least!) called EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0 Home Edition. The free alternative to PartitionMagic will do all the good stuff PartitionMagic did for me, so what’s the catch? It is only free FOR HOME USERS and 32 Bit Operating Systems. Fair enough. Let’s take her for a test drive.

I have a NTFS IDE hard drive sitting on my desk with some old data on it. I believe it is a 80GB drive. Let’s see how hard it will be to split that into two drives without putting the kibosh on my data.

I started by downloading the installer file from Download.com here. It is a 7.9MB zip file. The zip file has one exe file in it that is slightly larger. I ran it, plugged my hard drive into an IDE-USB enclosure for the test and got down to business…

I chose the partition I want to resize and I right-clicked on it. It gave me this context menu.

I chose Resize and I got the screen below. I have not had issues with resizing or moving partitions back in the day but you SHOULD ALWAYS BACKUP before starting any operation that messes with your file structure. So if you haven’t backed up yet… Do it now!

On the next screen you tell the partition resizer how much space you want after you are complete. Then you simply click OK and let it rock and roll.

Now as you can see by the new notification in the lower left hand corner, it says there is one operation pending. Now you need to click ‘apply’ to start it off.

Then another confirmation box will pop up asking you if you are ready to do this now…

Then for most of the resizing/moving partition options Windows will need to reboot to finish its process. Make sure you don’t have any open files and you are ready to continue.

That is it and you are on your way to having another partition created without erasing your disk or dropping some serious duckets.

How To Reinstall Windows Without Losing Your Data

The Windows XP installation CD includes an option to repair an existing Windows XP installation. Using this option allows you to reinstall Windows without losing the files, personal data and programs you already have on the system. To take advantage of it, just place the CD into your CD or DVD drive on your PC and reboot the computer.

During the installation you will be prompted if you wish to use the recovery console to repair a Windows installation. The recovery console is rather limited in its use, so just press the Enter key to proceed with the installation as you would normally.

Press F8 to continue past the Licensing Agreement.

The next screen should display a prompt asking you if you wish to repair an existing installation. Select your Windows installation (most likely it is the only one) and press R.

This will begin the repair and reinstallation of Windows. The installation will copy files to the hard drive, reboot the system, and then proceed just like a normal installation. Follow the prompts just as you normally would any normal Windows installation.

When the installation completes, you should still be able to access all of your documents and installed programs.

Full Windows Reinstall Without Loosing Data and Programs

I personally prefer to perform a full clean reinstallation of Windows. With the clean install, the hard drive is formatted and programs are reinstalled. If you want to use this method, you can use the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (AKA FAST).

To use FAST, you first have to run it from the old Windows installation. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Files and Settings Transfer Wizard.

Tell FAST that you are on the Old Computer, then click Next.

Finally, select the location where you would wish to save the files. Portable USB drives were born for stuff like this. Be warned though, the drive may not be big enough. Another option would be to save the settings somewhere on your hard drive first, and then move them over to multiple USB drives or burn them to CDs/DVDs.

Click Next, and wait for the files to be copied. If you have a lot of data, it may take quite a while for the process to complete. Once it has completed, your settings are ready for the new installation.

Once you’ve reinstalled Windows, launch FAST just as you did initially to save your settings:

Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Click Next. This time when prompted which computer you are using, select New computer. Click Next.

The following screen will ask you if you have a Windows XP installation CD for creating a wizard disk. A wizard disk can be used for loading settings from another computer. In this case, a wizard disk is not necessary since the files have been saved to another location.

Select I don’t need the Wizard Disk. I already have collected my files and settings from my old computer. Click Next to proceed.

Finally, you will be prompted for the location of the files and settings. Select the Other radio button and browse to the location where you saved the files and click Next.

The files and settings will then be copied to the new computer. You may want to install all of the same programs you had on the old computer that you intend to use, before you run FAST. This will help to ensure that your settings will work properly with them.