How This Book Is Organized
This book is not a mere tips-and-tricks compendium that tells you where to click, where to drag, and what commands to type. It takes advantage of XP’s flexibility and new features, recognizes that there are specific tasks you want to accomplish with the operating system, and offers you bite-sized pieces of functionality that you can put to use in a few minutes. It also shows how you can expand on their usefulness yourself. To give you this kind of help, the book is organized into 12 chapters:
- Chapter 1, Startup and Shutdown
With XP, startup and shutdown can mean much more than turning on your PC or selecting “Shut Down” form the start menu. With hacks in this chapter, you can change the picture that appears on the startup screen, speed up the sometimes endless startup and shutdown processes, hack the Registry to control many different aspects of startup and shutdown, customize multiboot options, and much more.
- Chapter 2, The User Interface
XP lets you change the way it looks and works more than any other version of Windows, and this chapter shows how to do it. Want a speedy, stripped-down version of the OS? It’s in here. Want to build your own themes and find thousands more online? It’s in here as well. So are hacks for controlling the Control Panel, Start Menu, and Taskbar; creating transparent windows; and building your own cursors and icons. The hacks don’t stop there, so interface hackers may want to head here first.
- Chapter 3, Windows Explorer
Windows ...
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