Article on redirecting My Documents folder and other standard folders in Windows

Disable error reporting on program crash (These three tips are from this handy website)

By default, when a program crashes in Windows XP, A window pop up asking you if you wish to send an error report to Microsoft. This tends to add extra irritation to the already annoying fact of a program crash. To disable this behaviour, a slight registry change is in order:

Open REGEDIT

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting.

Edit the following value:

Value Name: DoReport

Value: 0 to disable the error report prompt.

*****
Speed up the Start Menu
The Windows XP start menu has a built in delay time between your pointer landing on a menu and that menu being displayed. Using the registry, you can reduce the time it takes the start menu to unfold its menus:

Open REGEDIT

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\

Edit the MenuShowDelay value. The default is 400, lower values will speed up the start menu. I would not recommend using 0, but experiment to find your favourite setting.

******
Create a link to shutdown your PC

To create a useful link desktop link to shutdown your PC without having to click on “start”, follow these directions:

Right click on an empty area of your desktop, then select ‘new’ and ’shortcut’ to open the new shortcut wizard.

When prompted for the location of the shortcut, enter ‘SHUTDOWN -s -t 01′

Name the shortcut and give it an appropriate icon from the ‘%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll’ location.

You can then drag it into the task bar at the bottom.

*****
How to show the date in the bottom of the computer — just drag the edge of the panel at the bottom to make it a little wider –two rows, and on the right it will show the date and week day. You can also drag all your programs into that bar so you don’t have to have them on your desktop. You might have to go to display/ and then “unlock task bar” or something like that.

*****

Here is a funny article about how to handle your email problem

Here is a super great thing to do if you have time: create macros in Microsoft Outlook to file folders with one click.