Windows XP in a Nutshell | O'Reilly Media

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In many ways, Windows XP is a bit of an anachronism. On one hand, it is technically only an incremental upgrade to Windows 2000, released only a year earlier. On the other hand, it is the first consumer-level operating system based on a powerful and robust platform previously available only to advanced users and network administrators.

Windows XP is easily the most technically sophisticated operating system Microsoft has ever released, but it is adorned with an almost cartoonish interface. It has an advanced, scalable networking system built in, but networking is easier to set up in Windows XP than in any other release. It has the heftiest system requirements of any Windows to date, but given the same hardware, it ends up outperforming its predecessors in almost every way. It also has more superfluous bells and whistles than any other OS, but will likely be the OS of choice for most power users for several years to come.

There's more to understanding Windows XP than simply knowing how to open applications and manage your files effectively. In this chapter, we'll cover what's new in this release and how Windows XP fits into the big picture. Move on to Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 for some of the more basic aspects of day-to-day use of the operating system, or skip ahead to the later chapters for more of the meatier content.

The first few releases of Microsoft Windows in the early 1980s were little more than clunky graphical application launchers that ran on top of the Disk Operating System (DOS) (see Chapter 6 for details). Version 3.x, released in the late 1980's, gained popularity due to its improved interface (awful by today's standards, though) and ability to access all of a computer's memory. Being based on DOS, however, it was not terribly stable, crashed frequently, and had very limited support for networking and no support for multiple user accounts.

Soon thereafter, Windows NT 3.0 ("NT" for New Technology) was released. Although it shared the same interface as Windows 3.0, it was based on a more robust and secure

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The first few releases of Microsoft Windows in the early 1980s were little more than clunky graphical application launchers that ran on top of the Disk Operating System (DOS) (see Chapter 6 for details). Version 3.x, released in the late 1980's, gained popularity due to its improved interface (awful by today's standards, though) and ability to access all of a computer's memory. Being based on DOS, however, it was not terribly stable, crashed frequently, and had very limited support for networking and no support for multiple user accounts.

Soon thereafter, Windows NT 3.0 ("NT" for New Technology) was released. Although it shared the same interface as Windows 3.0, it was based on a more robust and secure kernel , the underlying code upon which the interface and all of the applications run. Among other things, it didn't rely on DOS and was capable of running32-bit applications (Windows 3.0 could only run more feeble 16-bit applications). Unfortunately, it was a white elephant of sorts, enjoying limited commercial appeal due to its stiff hardware requirements and scant industry support.

In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95. Although based on DOS like Windows 3.x (it was known internally as Windows 4.0), it was a 32-bit operating system with a new interface. It was the first step in migrating the enhanced capability of the Windows NT architecture to the more commercially accepted, albeit less capable, DOS-based Windows line. Soon thereafter, Windows NT 4.0 was released, which brought the new Windows 95-style interface to the NT line. Both of these grand gestures were engineered to further blur the line between these two different Microsoft platforms. Although both operating systems sported the same interface, Windows NT still never garnered the industry support and commercial success of Windows 95.

As time progressed, the lineage of Microsoft Windows became even less linear. Windows 2000, despite its name, was not the successor to Windows 98 and Windows 95; Windows Me, released at the same time, had that distinction. Instead, Windows 2000 was the next installment of the NT line; it was actually known internally as Windows NT 5.0. Windows 2000 was particularly notable for being the first version of Windows NT to support plug-and-play, which was yet another move to combine the two platforms.

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What you'll find new in Windows XP depends entirely on your perspective, or more specifically, the version of Windows you used last. As described earlier in this chapter, Windows XP is a more substantial upgrade for Windows 9x/Me users, but that doesn't mean there's nothing new for Windows 2000 users. Although the following list of changes is not comprehensive, it does highlight some of the more interesting changes for users coming from both platforms.

As explained earlier in this chapter, the biggest change Windows 9x/Me users will notice is the dramatically improved stability of Windows XP. Although applications still crash in XP, they're much less likely to bring down the whole system.
While Windows 9x/Me would slow down after only a few hours of use (requiring a reboot to bring it back to life), Windows XP can be left on for weeks without so much as a hiccup. The difference is the way system resources, an area of memory devoted to managing running applications and their interface elements, are handled: in Windows 9x/Me, this is a fixed (and rather small) area ofmemory, which can fill up fast. In Windows XP, system resources are allocated dynamically, which means you'll never run out.
While Windows 9x/Me supported multiple users, this functionality was never more than a way for different users to have differentcolor schemes and desktop icons. In Windows XP, multiple user management is much more sophisticated. If you're using Windows XP Professional (see Section 1.2.2), a user will be able to securely encrypt files and folders so that other users can't read or modify them.
Networking in Windows XP is much more powerful and secure than in Windows 9x/Me, but is substantially easier to set up and configure. The Network Properties window (see Chapter 7) actually makes sense now!

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Although only the Home and Professional editions of Windows XP are covered in this book, there are actually six editions of Microsoft Windows XP:

Windows XP Home
Windows XP Professional
Windows XP .NET Standard Server
Windows .NET Enterprise Server
Windows .NET Datacenter Server
Windows XP 64-bit

Although all these editions of XP are similar, only the Home and Professional editions will be of interest to end users, while the others are intended for use in large corporations (Enterprise) as high-end server platforms.

The Home and Professional editions of Windows XP are nearly identical; the only differences are additional features found in the Professional edition that will appeal to power users and small businesses. The primary differences, aside from the price and the color of the packaging, are shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1: Differences between Windows XP Professional and Home editions
	Windows XP Home	Windows XP Professional
Multiple processor support	None.	Single and dual-processor systems are supported.
Networking	Built-in support for peer-to-peer networking for up to five computers.

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Finally, I'd like to note the Windows Update feature in Windows XP. Since its initial release, Microsoft has made several updates to the software available on their web site. These updates range from simple bug fixes to patches for major security holes. It's highly recommended that you either run the Windows Update feature routinely or enable the Automatic Updates feature so that you'll never be without the latest and greatest fixes (andbugs). See Windows Update in Chapter 4 for more information.

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This material in this chapter provides a quick overview of the features of the Windows XP user interface, which should be sufficient to help you get oriented and make the most of the system fairly quickly. If you're already familiar with the basic Windows interface, you may still find subtle differences between Windows XP and previous versions, making this chapter worth a quick read. If you're fairly new to Windows, you should definitely take the time to read this chapter. Concepts that advanced users might consider elementary should prove pretty enlightening. The most important thing is to get a sense of the continuity (or occasionally the lack thereof) in the Windows XP interface so that you can tackle any new Windows application with ease. Note, however, that if you are a very inexperienced user, you may prefer to start with a tutorial book on Windows XP, such as O'Reilly's Windows XP: The Missing Manual, by David Pogue. Even though this chapter is more introductory than the rest of the book, it still moves pretty quickly. Still, if you just take your time and try each feature as it's introduced, you may find that you don't need a step-by-step introduction after all.

Like most modern operating systems that use graphical user interfaces (such as theMac,Unix, and earlier versions of Windows), Windows XP uses the metaphor of a Desktop with windows and file folders laid out on it. This Desktop metaphor is provided by a program called Windows Explorer (explorer.exe). Windows XP runs this program automatically every time you start Windows XP.

Figure 2-1 shows the main features of the Windows XP Desktop. The callouts in the figure highlight some of the special-purposeicons and buttons that may appear on the Desktop. Each of these is described further in Chapter 3.

Figure 2-1: Windows XP Desktop features

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Like most modern operating systems that use graphical user interfaces (such as theMac,Unix, and earlier versions of Windows), Windows XP uses the metaphor of a Desktop with windows and file folders laid out on it. This Desktop metaphor is provided by a program called Windows Explorer (explorer.exe). Windows XP runs this program automatically every time you start Windows XP.

Figure 2-1 shows the main features of the Windows XP Desktop. The callouts in the figure highlight some of the special-purposeicons and buttons that may appear on the Desktop. Each of these is described further in Chapter 3.

Figure 2-1: Windows XP Desktop features

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Windows XP offers several settings that affect the way the interface responds to mouse clicks. The default setting (the way it works when you first install Windows XP) will also be familiar to most users, as it is fairly consistent with the way most operating systems work.

Depending on your current settings, however, Windows may respond to mouse clicks differently. See Section 2.2.2 that follows for differences. Later on, you'll see how to choose between the classic behavior and the alternate behavior.

If you are one of the few computer users who haven't used a graphical user interface before, here are some things you need to know:

PCs usually come with a two- or three-button mouse (unlike the one-button mouse used with the Macintosh), although there are a variety of alternatives, such as touchpads (common on laptops), trackballs, and styluses.
To click an object means to move the pointer to the desired screen object and press and release the left mouse button.
Double-click means to click twice in rapid succession with the button on the left. (Clicking twice doesn't accomplish the same thing.)
Right-click means to click with the button on the right.
If your mouse has three or more buttons, you should just use the primary buttons on the left and the right, and read the documentation that comes with your pointing device to find out what you can do with the others. (You can often configure the middle button to take over functions like double-clicking, cut and paste, inserting inflammatory language into emails, and so on.)

The default setting is consistent with most operating systems, including previous versions of Windows. You can tell if you have the default style if the captions under the icons on your Desktop are

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Windows XP has more ways to launch a program than just about any other operating system.

You can:

Double-click on a programicon in Explorer, on the Desktop, or in a folder window.
Double-click on a file associated with an application to launch that application and open the file.
Pick the name of a program from the Start menu. (See Start Menu in Chapter 3 for details.)
Click on a program's icon in theQuick Launch Toolbar to start it. This Toolbar can include icons for any programs, although by default, it only has icons forInternet Explorer,Outlook Express, and MSN. See Toolbars in Chapter 3 for details.)
Right-click on a file, executable, or application icon and choose Open.
Select (highlight) an icon and press the Enter key.
Type the filename of a program in the Address Bar, which can be displayed next to the Toolbar in any folder window, in Explorer, in Internet Explorer, or even as part of the Taskbar. You may also have to include the path (the folder and drive name) for some items.
Select Run from the Start menu and type the filename of a program. You may also have to include the path (the folder and drive name) for some items.
Open a command prompt window and type the name of the program at the prompt. Note that some knowledge of the command prompt (commonly known as DOS) is required — see Chapter 6 for details.
Create shortcuts to files or applications. A shortcut is a kind of pointer or link — a small file and associated icon that point to a file or program in another location. You can put these shortcuts on the Desktop, in the Start menu, or anywhere else you find convenient. Double-click on a shortcut to launch the program. To launch programs automatically at startup, just place a shortcut in your Startup folder (

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Among the new interface changes in Windows XP is the configurablevisualstyle with which all screen elements (windows, buttons, menus, the Start menu, etc.) are shown. Users of previous versions will immediately notice the default style in Windows XP, which has a more colorful, cartoony feel than the "classic" style more common to previous releases.

Unfortunately, many of the new interface changes in Windows XP, such as the new style, are turned on by default. This causes several problems. First, these changes widen the knowledge gap between novices, unaware of the ability or means to modify their environment, and experienced Windows users, who will most likely restore Windows XP to the "classic" interface within minutes of installation. Second, seasoned Windows users will avoid Windows XP for fear of being "stuck" with the new interface. Third, less-experienced users who read technical documentation, such as this book, may be confused by the reference to screen elements that do not appear on their systems.

A prime example is the Control Panel in Windows XP. The new default Control Panel interface (a consequence of the optional Web Content in Folders, as discussed in Section 2.8.6, later in this chapter) separates its contents into several categories. The category selection must therefore be included as an additional step to any discussion of the Control Panel.

For instance, to choose the style (explained at the beginning of this topic), double-click on the Display icon in Control Panel (short notation: Control Panel → Display). If, however, if you are using the Categorized view of Control Panel, you would click Appearance and Themes in Control Panel, and then click Display (short notation: Control Panel → Appearance and Themes → Display).

To make the Control Panel easier to use, turn off the categorized view by clicking "Switch to Classic View" in the lefthand pane. To turn off the lefthand pane altogether, go to Tools → Folder Options and select "Use Windows Classic Folders." For simplicity, all subsequent discussion of the Control Panel in this book will assume you're using the classic view of the Control Panel.

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Any open window contains a frame with a series of standard decorations, as shown in Figure 2-4. To move a window from one place to another, click on the titlebar and drag.

Figure 2-4: The decorations of a standard window: titlebar, title buttons, menu, and a scrollable client area

Most types of windows are resizable, meaning that you can stretch them horizontally and vertically to make them smaller or larger. Just grab an edge or a corner and start dragging. There are two shortcuts that come in quite handy: maximize and minimize. If you click the maximize button (the middle button in the cluster in the upper right of most windows), the window will be resized to fill the screen. Maximized windows can't be moved or resized. If you minimize a window (the left-most button in the cluster), it is shrunk out of sight and appears only as a button on the Taskbar. Minimizing is handy to get windows out of the way without closing them.

Under certain circumstances, one or two scrollbars might appear along the bottom and far-right of a window. These allow you to move the window's view so that you can see all its contents. This behavior can be counterintuitive for new users because moving the scrollbar in one direction will cause the window's contents to move in the opposite direction. Look at it this way: the scrollbar doesn't move the contents; it moves the viewport. Imagine a very long document with very small type. Moving thescrollbars is like moving a magnifying glass — if you move the glass down the document and look through the magnifier, it looks like the document is moving up.

If multiple windows are open, only one window has the focus . The window with the focus is usually (but not always) the one on top of all the other windows, and it is usually distinguished by a border and title that are distinguished in some way from the rest, usually appearing in a darker color. The window with the focus is the one that responds to keystrokes, although any window will respond to mouse clicks. To give any window the focus, just click on any visible portion of it, and it will pop to the front. Be careful where you click on the intended window, however, as the click may go further than simply activating it (if you click on a button on a window that doesn't have the focus, for example, it will not only activate the window, but press the button as well).

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Windows' primary interface is graphical, meaning that you point and click to interact with it. The problem is that repeated clicking can become very cumbersome, especially for repetitive tasks. Luckily, Windows has an extensive array of keyboard accelerators (sometimes called keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys ) that provide a simple keyboard alternative to almost every feature normally accessible with the mouse. Some of these keyboard accelerators (such as F1 for help, Ctrl-C to copy, and Ctrl-V topaste) date back more than twenty years and are nearly universal, while others are specific to Windows XP or a given application.

Appendix C gives a complete list of keyboard accelerators. Some of the most important ones are described below:

Menu navigation: In any window that has a menu, press the Alt key or the F10 key to activate the menu bar, and use the cursor (arrow) keys to move around. Press Enter to activate the currently selected item or Esc to cancel.

You can also activate specific menus with the keyboard. When you press Alt or F10, each menu item will have a single character that is underlined (such the V in View); when you see this character, it means you can press Alt-V (for example) to go directly to that menu. Once that menu has opened, you can activate any specific item pressing the corresponding key (such as D for Details) — you don't even need to press Alt this time. The abbreviated notation for this is Alt-V+D (which means press Alt and V together, and then press D). You'll notice that it's much faster than using the mouse.

The other way to activate specific menu items is to use the special keyboard shortcuts shown to the right of each menu item (where applicable). For example, open the Edit menu in most windows, and you'll see that Ctrl+Z is a shortcut for Undo, Ctrl-V is a shortcut for Paste, and Ctrl-A is a shortcut for Select All. These are even faster than the navigation hotkeys described above. A few notes: not all menu items have this type of keyboard shortcut, and these shortcuts only work from within the application that "owns" the menu.

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Many application and system windows use a common set of controls in addition to the ubiquitous titlebar, menubar, system menu, and scrollbars. This section describes a few of these common controls.

Figure 2-5 shows some of the common controls in Control Panel → Display → Screen Saver and the additional dialog box that pops up from its Settings button.

Figure 2-5: Common controls in Windows applications and dialogs

Some of these controls include:

(1) Tabbed dialogs: Settings may be grouped into separate tabbed dialog pages. For example, see Control Panel → System or Control Panel → Display. Click on any tab to bring that page to the front.
(2) Radio buttons: Radio buttons are used for mutually exclusive settings. Clicking on one causes any other that has been pressed to pop up, just like on an old car radio. The button with the dot in the middle is the one that has been selected. Sometimes you'll see more than one group of buttons, with a separate outline around each group. In this case, you can select one radio button from each group.
(3) Drop-down lists: Any time you see a downward-pointing arrow next to a text field, click on the arrow to drop down a list of other values. Often, a drop-down list contains a history of previous entries you've made into a text entry field. Pressing the first letter will often jump to that place in the list, as long as the list has the focus. The down arrow (or F4) will also drop down the currently selected list. The arrow keys will scroll through the stored entries, even if the list is not already dropped down. Microsoft sometimes calls these lists "Look In Lists." For an example, see Start

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Files are the basic unit of long-term storage on a computer. Files are organized into folders, which are stored on disks. (In DOS, Unix, and earlier versions of Windows, folders were more often referred to as directories, but both terms are still used.) This section reviews fundamental filesystem concepts, including file- and disk-naming conventions and file types.

Like every version of Windows that preceded it, Windows XP retains the basic DOSdisk-naming conventions. Drives are differentiated by a single letter of the alphabet followed by a colon:

A:: Represents the first "floppy" (usually 3.5-inch) disk drive on the system
B:: Represents the second floppy disk drive, if present
C:: Represents the first hard disk drive or the first partition of the first hard disk drive
D:: Often represents a CD-ROM drive, but can represent an additional hard disk drive or other removable drive
E: - Z:: Represent additional hard disk drives, removable cartridges such as Zip or Jaz drives, or mapped network drives

By default, driver letters are assigned consecutively, but it's possible to change the drive letters for most drives so that you can have a drive N: without having a drive

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Many of those who are new to computers will never have heard of thecommand line, also known as the command prompt or the Disk Operating System (DOS) prompt. (DOS was the operating system used by most PCs before Windows became ubiquitous. The command line in DOS was the only way to start programs and manage files.) Those who might have used older PCs may remember the command line, but may be under the impression that it's purely a thing of the past. Advanced users, on the other hand, whether they remember the old days of the DOS command line or not, have probably learned the advantages of the command-line interface, even when using Windows XP on a day-to-day basis.

Many tasks can be performed more quickly by typing one or more commands into the command prompt window. In addition, many of the programs listed in Chapter 4 are command-line based tools, and some familiarity with the command prompt is necessary if you plan to use them.

For full documentation on the command line and the Command Prompt application, see Chapter 6. Also see Chapter 3 for information on the Address Bar and Start → Run, two alternatives to the Command Prompt window.

Here are a few examples that show how the command line can be used as an alternative to the GUI:

To create afolder called sample in the root directory of your hard disk, and then copy all the files from another folder into the new folder, for example, it can be quicker and easier to type:
```
C:\>mkdir \sample
C:\>copy d:\stuff\*.* \sample
                  
```
than it would to open Windows Explorer, navigate to your d:\stuff folder, select all the files, click File → Copy (or Ctrl-C), navigate to the new location, click New → Folder, type the folder name, open the new folder; and then click Edit → Paste (or Ctrl-V) to copy in the files. That's a heck of a sentence, and a heck of a lot of steps for what can be accomplished with the two simple commands shown above.

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Most windows have some degree of online documentation, in the form of a Help menu that you can pull down with the mouse or by typing Alt-H. In addition, you can pressF1 at almost any time to display help. In some situations, pressing F1 will only display a tiny yellow message (known as a tooltip ) with a brief description of the item with the focus; at other times, F1 will launch an online index to help topics. Sometimes, F1 will have no effect whatsoever.

Furthermore, if you hold the pointer over many screen objects (such as items on the Taskbar or a window's toolbar), a tooltip may appear. A tooltip may display nothing more than the name of the object to which you're pointing, but in other cases, it may provide additional information. For example, placing the pointer on the system clock pops up the date. You can turn tooltips off in the Windows interface by going to Control Panel → Folder Options → View and turning off the option "Show pop-up description for folder and Desktop items." Note that this won't necessarily turn off tooltips in other applications — only Explorer.

At the command prompt, you can get help on the available command-line options by typing:

commandname /?

Finally, Windows XP includes a number of readme files, which typically contain release notes — information about special handling required for specific applications or hardware devices. The file c:\Windows\readme.txt contains a list of all the other readme files on the system. Or, you can just look in the \Windows directory for any file with the .txt extension. Use Notepad or any other ASCII text editor or word processor to read them.

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You shouldn't just turn off the power to a Windows XP machine, since it caches a lot of data in memory and needs to write it out before shutting down. See Shut Down in Chapter 3 for additional details.

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One of the responsibilities of a graphical operating system like Windows XP is to provide a common set of interface controls not only for itself, but for all the applications that run on it. This chapter provides an alphabetical reference to the elements of the Windows XP user interface, how they're used, and what tricks can be performed with them. Also included are some of the building blocks of the Windows XP shell (commonly known as Explorer), such as the Desktop and the various toolbars, Chapter 4 provides a similar alphabetical reference to the individual programs and utilities that make up Windows, whether they are accessible through the graphical user interface or the command line. The alphabetical reference entries in this chapter are as follows:

Address Bar	Labels	Shortcuts
Buttons	Listboxes	Shut Down
Checkboxes	Log Off	Start Menu
Clipboard	Menus

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This chapter provides an alphabetical reference to all of the useful components that make up Windows XP: an encyclopedia of everything you can do with Windows out of the box. Some of the more prominent applications and utilities that come with Windows XP are available through shortcuts on the Start menu, but many useful tools aren't as conspicuous — available only to those who know where to look. What you'll undoubtedly find interesting is the large number of applications that aren't listed in the Start menu or documented in the manual or in most books.

At the beginning of each entry, you'll find all the different methods of launching (or opening) these components, including their locations in the Start menu (if applicable), their executable filenames for starting them from the command prompt, or any other means of accessing the component. See Chapter 2 for an overview of all the ways to launch programs in Windows XP.

You may need to use the command prompt to run some of the programs listed in this chapter (see Figure 4-1). In addition to the command prompt application, cmd.exe, two other elements in Windows XP can also be used as command prompts. The Address Bar, typically found at the top of the Internet Explorer window, is where you type a web site address to instruct IE to open the corresponding web page. The Address Bar can also be used as a rudimentary command prompt, where you can type application filenames, document filenames, and even folder names to open them. The Address Bar can appear at the top of any Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer window, and can even be placed on the Taskbar. The other alternative to the command prompt is the Run entry in the Start menu, which behaves nearly identically to the Address Bar. To start an instance of the Command window, select Start → .cmd or type cmd in the Address Bar of any window.

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You may need to use the command prompt to run some of the programs listed in this chapter (see Figure 4-1). In addition to the command prompt application, cmd.exe, two other elements in Windows XP can also be used as command prompts. The Address Bar, typically found at the top of the Internet Explorer window, is where you type a web site address to instruct IE to open the corresponding web page. The Address Bar can also be used as a rudimentary command prompt, where you can type application filenames, document filenames, and even folder names to open them. The Address Bar can appear at the top of any Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer window, and can even be placed on the Taskbar. The other alternative to the command prompt is the Run entry in the Start menu, which behaves nearly identically to the Address Bar. To start an instance of the Command window, select Start → .cmd or type cmd in the Address Bar of any window.

Figure 4-1: Some tools can be used only at the Command Prompt, such as the Windows IP Configuration utility

Note that some of the components listed in this chapter are purely command-line based. That is, rather than having interactive windows of their own, they rely on the command prompt application to receive commands and display information. Many of these types of programs (often called console applications) simply close when they've completed their task. This means that if you launch one of these programs from the Start menu or Address Bar, it will simply appear and disappear before you know what happened. To use one of these components, you must first open a command prompt window (cmd.exe) and type the command there.

Chapter 6 provides more detail on how to use the command prompt and explains the more subtle differences between the command prompt application and the Address Bar. Chapter 3 documents the Address Bar further.

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The following reference lists all the useful, discrete components that come with Windows XP, sorted alphabetically by their common names (e.g., Minesweeper would be found under "M," not "W" for winmine.exe).

Note that some components are not installed by default. The set of components included with a basic Windows XP installation depends on the method by which Windows XP was installed, whether it was installed fresh, or over an older version of Windows. Any of the following components that appear to be missing can be added easily by using Add or Remove Programs (discussed later in this chapter) and clicking the Add/Remove Windows Components button.

Table 4-1 provides an easy cross reference between the common name and the executable filename of an application or other component. Unlike previous editions of this book, control panel options are included in this chapter. For these items, the corresponding command line varies (and is documented more completely in the Control Panel section in this chapter), but usually consists of the .cpl filename, as specified in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1: Executable filenames of the applications and tools in Windows XP
Common application name	Executable filename / command line	Professional edition only
Accessibility Options	`access.cpl`
Accessibility Wizard

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Accessibility Options

\windows\system\access.cpl

Provides options for the accessibility tools in Windows XP

To Open

Control Panel → [Accessibility Options] → Accessibility Options

Command Prompt → access.cpl

Description

Accessibility is Microsoft's term for the collection of tools and settings designed to make a computer easier to use for those with poor eyesight, hearing, or some other physical challenge. The settings in this dialog are shown on the following five tabs:

Keyboard: StickyKeys allows you to use keyboard combinations, such as Shift-Y and Alt-F4, without having to hold down more than one key simultaneously.

FilterKeys lets you configure Windows' behavior when a key is held down, such as how long a key must be held down before it starts to repeat and how fast it repeats once it starts (settings are also available in Control Panel → [Printers and Other Hardware] → Keyboard → Speed). However, FilterKeys also lets you disable keyboard repeat completely.

ToggleKeys instructs the Windows to play sounds whenever you press Caps Lock, Num Lock, or Scroll Lock.
Sounds: SoundSentry lets you substitute visual warnings (e.g., flashing the titlebar or the entire screen) for sounds normally made for the system.

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Accessibility Wizard

\windows\system32\accwiz.exe

A step-by-step interface designed to help choose accessibility options

To Open

Start → Programs → Accessories → Accessibility → Accessibility Wizard

Command Prompt → accwiz

Description

The Accessibility Wizard is simply an alternate interface to the settings provided in the Accessibility Options dialog (see Figure 4-3). Accessibility is Microsoft's term for the collection of tools and settings designed to make a computer easier to use for those with poor eyesight, hearing, or some other physical challenge. The advantage of the Wizard interface here is that it will walk you through the available options, one-by-one, lending assistance where you may not know which options you need. For example, you can change the font size with predetermined settings based on your needs or disability, rather than by simply changing a numeric value.

Figure 4-3: The Accessibility Wizard asks questions and sets Accessibility options accordingly

Notes

In addition to the settings and utilities normally found in the Accessibility Options window, the Accessibility Wizard also makes it easy to turn off "personalized menus," a feature found in later versions of Windows that shows or hides menu items based on how frequently they're used. Since personalized menus can make Windows more difficult to use, you may want to disable this feature, whether or not you need the other accessibility options.

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