Configuring Windows XP

Introduction

Windows XP is the most adaptable and “tweakable” operating system that Microsoft have released to date. It can be configured in many different ways to perform many different tasks.

XP has the facilities to act as a flexible and full featured network machine and can also be stripped down to run as an economical home machine. Microsoft released two versions of XP, home and professional which are optimised for use in their respective environments, but there is still a fair amount of tweaking that can be done in both versions, more so in professional but that’s because of it’s extended functionality.

Tweaking the GUI

It’s a matter of opinion whether XP is good looking or just damn right ugly! If your one of those people that either can’t stand XP’s GUI or simply want their desktop to be original than you’ll be pleased to know that there are many options to transform the look of XP.

First of all the look of XP is just a Windows Theme and can be changed to the old Windows 98 style start menu and taskbar:

START -> CONTROL PANEL -> DISPLAY -> THEME: WINDOWS CLASSIC

Windows Classic Theme




If your trying to get XP to run on a low spec machine one of the best ways to improve performance is to customise or disable all together the animated graphical features in XP. This can be accomplished through the Performance Options menu.

START -> CONTROL PANEL -> SYSTEM -> ADVANCED -> PERFORMANCE SETTINGS

The performance options menu allows you to select the graphical effect's you'd like to use within XP. This covers things like sliding menus and show window contents while dragging, although XP looks nice with these settings enabled, I'm sure most people, including myself would prefer to increase performance rather than looks, to do this simply un tick all the options or click adjust for best performance. By disabling these optional features you should see a noticeable difference in the speed of menus and loading windows.