Playing Frets on Fire with the official Red Octane SG or Gibson Guitar Controller shouldn’t be difficult to setup, but it’s a little more complicated than Plug-N-Play. Frets on Fire doesn’t seem to retain joystick settings when mapping the buttons from a Guitar Controller into the game. It may work for a little while, but I’m sure many have noticed that the controller setup is bound to fail. Mainly the Strum Bar fails to function during the game (which really sucks when you’re in the middle of a song, hell, or just trying to navigate the menus). This guide will show you how to properly setup your Guitar Hero controller to work flawlessly with Frets on Fire everytime!
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Replace the Windows Taskbar with the Mac OS X Dock

If you are a Windows user who always wanted to get rid of the Taskbar for a more sleek approach - look no further. RK Launcher for Windows is a tiny application that mimics the functionality of the Dock in OS X. It even captures many of the special effects such as the magnification of the dock icons when the mouse hovers over them, drag-and-drop adding and removing (complete with the “POOF” effect), the genie effect for minimizing windows, etc. The developer hasn’t worked on it for a bit (since 2005), but the beta works great for now!

Download RK Launcher

If you like the look of Windows XP Media Center Edition you’ll love this. With a theme download (rumored to be from Microsoft’s website) you can now easily install the Royale theme used on Windows XP MCE on your Windows XP install. Finally, you can rid yourself of the generic and somewhat childish colour scheme of the default Windows XP theme.

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I have shown you how to shut down xp faster so logically I guess my next article is how to boot up xp faster. Everyone wants a computer that boots really fast and the only way to do that is to stop all those pesky programs that automatically get started at start up. This guide will walk you through using the System Configuration Utility to have complete control of Windows XP Startup Items.

Checking Startup Items

Click Start > All Programs and look for Startup

These are all the program that are slated to startup when XP does. This is one of the big problems in the faster boot up game.The more there, the longer your machine will take to startup. To remove any unnecessary Startup Item from the Startup List just Right-Click on the item to delete and Click Delete.

System Configuration Utility Changes

You would like to think this article is done but it is not, that was only half of the battle, the next thing to do is to go System Configuration Utility and change your startup services.

To do this just go to Start> Run and type in “msconfig“, (without the “”).

Once in the System Configuration Utility, Click on the Startup Tab

Under the Startup Tab is a list of all your programs that startup when the computer does, (these are different then the ones in the startup on the all programs tab). You can disable a program from starting at boot by unchecking it in the Startup list. It is safe to disable all of these except one, your anti-virus, but in doing so certain programs like AIM, Google Talk, and other appications won’t load on startup. Usually what I do is pull out the command section (look at above picture) so I can see which programs have automatic startup.

If you are having problems and can’t figure out what a startup is, go to sysinfo.org. Once there you will find a huge list of startup applications names and what they do.Well that is it, very simple, takes 10-15 tops and will hopefully allow you to gain a few seconds or minutes on your boot up.

By default Microsoft reserves 20% of your bandwidth for their own purposes (updates, error reporting, etc.). However, you can easily disable this feature and reclaim 20% of your bandwidth that otherwise sits idle.

Note: This method only works on Windows XP Professional.

1) Click START> Run

2) Type gpedit.msc in the Run dialog box. This will open up the Group Policy Editor.

3) Next go to Local Computer Policy> Computer Configuration> Administrative Templates> Network> QOS Packet Scheduler

4) Double Click on Limit Reservable Bandwidth

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5) On the Settings tab click ENABLE Reservable Bandwidth

6) Set the Bandwidth Limit percentage to ZERO.

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Now you will get that extra 20% of bandwidth that Microsoft has taken away from you!

Most of us remember the “old days” of computer gaming when shotty pixelated graphics were thought to be high-end.

Games like Leisure Suit Larry, Dune, Kings Quest, Populus, Wolfenstein 3-D, and even Duke Nukem 3-D are just a few in an endless list of games that are now branded as Abandonware. Surprisingly enough, those games and many others are readily available on the internet.

This guide will show you how to find and play all your favourite classic games without breaking out the old x486.

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Everyone has locked themselves out of their own system at least once and thought that formatting their hard drive was the only answer. Not true! Now you will never have to lose your data over your forgetfulness again! There are two methods to bypass Windows XP security, both of which are basic at best, but they work beautifully.

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Ever wonder what everyone else is doing on their User Accounts on Windows XP but can’t get in to find out. Try This:

1) Select Run from the start menu and type control userpasswords2, this will open the user

accounts application.

2) On the Users tab, Uncheck the box for Users Must Enter A User Name And Password To Use

This
Computer, and Click OK.

3) An Automatic Log On dialog box will appear. Enter the User Name and Password for the account you want to use.

Note:
I have not tried this on networks just my computer but next time you are at work give it a shot. Also, I’m not sure if this will work on a secure network, like in an office environment because most people do not have Administrator privileges.

I think we have all done this before; turned off the computer, went and got a shower (in severe cases went to bed) only to come back to the machine later on and it still was shutting down. Now, if you are like me then you never want to turn off your computer because it takes too long to turn off and too long to turn on. AltHack’s shutdown tweak guide will show you what to do to shut down smooth and fast, just like when you first got it.

Step 1 Backing up the Reg.

Before we do anything, we need to back up the registry because we are going to be mucking around in there and if something does go wrong we can just double-click on our back up and everthing will hopefully be better again. First thing we need to do is to click on start, click on run, then type “regedit”, without the “”.This will bring up the registry editor.

Next,click on the file menu and click export. I would name this regbackup, or my favorite doomsday device and save it to a nice secure place, where you will know where it is at, (mine is on my second hard drive in my computer). NOW REMEMBER, IF YOU EVER SCREW UP YOUR REGISTRY JUST DOUBLE CLICK ON THIS AND IT WILL AUTOMATICALLY REPLACE THE CURRENT ONE THAT HAS BEEN ALTERED.

Step 2 Making the Device shutdown faster

Open your regedit, please refer to step one if you have forgotten how to do this. Next go get a drink, ahh much better i say, ahhh ADD kicking in. Sorry, now Next find the following key, (it is just like a folder system so this should not be too hard) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control

Next click on the control folder. Now right-click “WaitToKillServiceTimeout”, (if you can’t find it, it is on the right side last one in the list, look at the above picture)
In the value data box enter a lower number, something around 1000 or so.

Reboot the computer and voila, you are finished and ready to shutdown faster.