How to assign Static IP address

To assign a Static IP Address to your network connection follow these steps:

Log in as adminstrator if any:

1. Open Network Connections

2. Right click the connection you wish to assign a Static Address to and choose Properties.

3. In the Properties box that comes up select "Internet Protocol TCP/IP" and click the Properties button beneath.

4. In Internet Protocol TCP/IP Properties place a dot in "Use the following IP Address".

5. Enter the IP address you wish to use and OK the change. Click OK on Local Area Connection Properties.

6. Reboot

Sacrifice the graphics for a fast system speed

XP is very graphic-intensive which results in a large consumption of RAM. Sometimes to squeeze in the nitty-gritty megs of memory can be, by sacrificing the pretty little bits and colors that are on your screen.

- For starters, reducing the color density and and bit display of your screen will ultimately increase speed to your computer.

1.)On your desktop, right click and go to PROPERTIES.
2.)In properties go to Settings, and set your color quality to the lowest bit-rating (most likely 15 bit). This will reduce color density, and icon quality, but will heavily boast system performance.

- If you really want to increase your system performance, new Windows themes are NOT the way to go, if you are ill-equipped with RAM.

1.) Go into Control Panel and into Performance and Maintenence (If you are using the "classic" view skip to step 2).
2.) Get into System and click on the Advanced tab.
3.) Now click on Performance
4.) Under your visual effects, select CHOOSE BEST PERFORMANCE.
5.) This will undoubtedly increase your system performance by returning XP into Classic Style and getting rid of the fancy-shmancy fading menus, shadows and whatnot.

Now your graphically challenged computer, has turned into a mean, lean, computing machine.

Happy Tweaking!

Tweak for fast system booting

If your computer takes a long time to become useable after starting up or logging on, or you want a clean boot of Windows XP try this,

Click Start > Run > Type "msconfig" > On the Startup tab click Disable All and on the Services tab check the Hide All Microsoft Service box and then click Disable All. Click Restart and Windows XP will restart with only the system services and applications running resulting in a vey fast logon / startup.

N.B This tweak will disable all non-system startup sevices and applications so if you have anything you want to run in the background such as anti virus software do not disable that item.

DMA mode on IDE devices

Just like Windows 2000, Windows XP still fails to set the DMA mode correctly for the IDE device designated as the slaves on the primary IDE and secondary IDE channels. Most CD-ROMS are capable of supporting DMA mode, but the default in XP is still PIO. Setting it to DMA won't make your CD-ROM faster, but it will consume less CPU cycles. Here's how:

1. Open the Device Manager. One way to do that is to right click on "My Computer", select the Hardware tab, and Select Device Manager.
2. Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and double-click on "Primary IDE Channel"
3. Under the "Advanced Settings" tab, check the "Device 1" setting. More than likely, your current transfer mode is set to PIO.
4. Set it to "DMA if available".

Repeat the step for the "Secondary IDE Channel" if you have devices attached to it. Reboot.

(Note: You will not see the Advanced Settings section if your hardware does not support it)

How to disable Auto-reboot

When using windows operating system and it crashes, you will get a blue screen and it will automatically restart, ofter it will restart too fast for you to see the error message. You could check the error log in this case but that is too easy. We are going to disable auto restart on system failure.

1. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> System (Windows+Pause works, too)
2. Go to Advanced
3. Under the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings...
4. Under System Failure un-check "Automatically restart"

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