Windows XP hacks continued...

Please refer to my previous post “Windows XP hacks” dated 22nd January, 2008 before doing the following changes in registry. You won’t be able to understand these hacks unless you read the above mentioned post:-

Applications not responding during shutdown:-
If an application does not respond during shutdown, XP will normally wait for a while to see if open applications shut down safely. To shutdown straightaway,
navigate to
HCU\Control Panel\Desktop
and to
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
In both these locations, change the string value called AutoEndTasks to 1 to kill applications immediately. WaitTo KillAppTimeout controls the default time in milliseconds, before killing the application. Reduce this spped to further speed up the process.

Start menu: Scrolling or Columns:-
By default, Start menu items are cascaded as columns across the screen. To switch the default start menu display mode to scrolling menu,
navigate to,
HCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
and to,
HLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Change the value of StartMenuScrollPrograms to “Yes”. Reboot the pc for the change to take effect.

Save RAM by turning off windows animation:-
In order to save your RAM, you can turn off unnecessary windows animation.
Navigate to,
HCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetricsChange the value of MinAnimate to 0 to disable Windows animation. A restart required.