Windows XP Hacks

Hacking Away at the Registry

Nine great hacks that use the Registry to do their magic.

You’ll find many dozens of Registry hacks sprinkled throughout this book, but to give you a sense of the breadth of the kinds of hacks that you can accomplish using the Registry, I’ve put a wide-ranging sample of Registry hacks here as well.

Automatically Close Programs at Shutdown

When you shut down Windows, if you have any programs running you’ll get a message box warning you that a program is still running. You then have to close the program and tell XP again to shut down. It’s a fairly pointless warning—better yet would be if XP automatically killed the programs without issuing the warning. That way, you wouldn’t get error messages and wouldn’t have to close each individual application before shutting down your computer.

To have XP automatically close programs at shutdown, run the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Edit the AutoEndTasks key so that is has a value of 1. If the key doesn’t exist, create it as a DWORD value and give it the value of 1. To disable it, either delete the key, or set the value to 0.

Disable XP Shutdown

There may be times when you want to make sure that XP can’t be inadvertently shut down. You can use a Registry hack to disable the normal Shut Down. Run the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Create a new DWORD value named NoClose with a data value of 1. Exit the Registry ...