Restore Icons That Have Been Removed from the Desktop in Windows XP

In Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition and Professional, the new Start menu is enabled by default. When the new Start menu is enabled, the My Computer, My Documents, and My Network Places icons are removed from the desktop.
• Right-click the Desktop and click Properties.
• Click the Desktop tab.
• Click Customize Desktop.
• Click the General tab, and then click the icons that you want to place on the desktop.
• Click OK.

Where does Window's Product Id get stored Tip

There are two places at least where ProductId gets stored. To see the first place, open Registry by going to START-RUN and entering REGEDIT and Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion]

In right pane, look for key by the name "ProductId". This is your Windows Product Id. Alternatively you can navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]

and still find same field with the name ProductId.

Disabling Display of Drives in My Computer

This is yet another trick you can play on your geek friend. To disable the display of local or networked drives when you click My Computer go to :
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Now in the right pane create a new DWORD item and name it NoDrives. Now modify it's value and set it to 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal) Now press F5 to refresh. When you click on My Computer, no drives will be shown. To enable display of drives in My Computer, simply delete this DWORD item. It's .reg file is as follows:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoDrives"=dword:03ffffff

Saving Memory and Increasing Speed

After you have set your cache setting to its optimum size as mentioned above, you will find more free memory. With the following tips, you can save even more memory.
• Clear the startup programs: When you start up Windows, several programs start and get loaded on to memory. These take up precious memory. Ideally, you should remove them using the settings provided in the programs themselves. But, if you can't, then use Startup Control Panel to do that. This program after its installation will be found in the Control Panel.
• RAM: A machine's speed can be simply improved by adding more RAM rather than going for a CPU upgrade. Get some additional RAM and see the improvement. If you have adequate RAM, but memory supply seems to be bottlenecked, then use RamBooster. It routinely frees some memory and can be custom adjusted for your needs. There are several such programs, but most of them make your system unstable. I had found no such problems with Rambooster.
• Watch the programs in memory: Using software such as TaskInfo to find out which are the programs that are running in memory and weed out those that you do not need.
• Three-button salute: If you cannot get software such as Taskinfo, then just press Ctrl+Alt+Delete combination once to bring up the Close Program dialog box. Ideally, when you have all programs closed and your taskbar is empty, there should be just three programs in this box - explorer, system tray, and your antivirus program. All other programs should be a waste. Most common culprits are Microsoft office, RealPlayer, Winamp, antivirus scheduler, etc. Just remove all those that are not needed using Startup Control Panel or using msconfig from the Run dialog box.
• Increasing the performance of individual programs: You can increase the speed of a program, by setting the priority of the program's process thread to either High or Realtime. Use TaskInfo (in Win 9x/ME) or Task Manager (in Windows 2000 by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del). Do not go overboard on this or your system will look very unresponsive.
• Active Desktop: Unless you run stock market price tickers on your desktop, deactivate Active Desktop to save memory. If you have enabled Active Desktop just to enable a GIF or JPEG file as the background, then convert the file to a BMP file and set that as the wallpaper without Active Desktop.
• Plain desktop: Remove the desktop background image and set it None. This will save some memory.
• Screen resolution: Set your screen resolution to 15 bit or 16 bit for both speed and saving memory. Set a higher level only when playing games and other such special stuff that require better resolutions.
• Clean the Desktop: Remove all unwanted icons from the desktop and shortcuts from the desktop and the quick launch bar. If you have shortcuts for CD drives, windows will check for their contents every time it loads up and cause a delay.
• Remove sound events: If you remove the sound events, your operations will get faster and are less likely to hang. To do so, go to Control Panel » Sounds and Multimedia » Schemes and then choose No Sounds.