<p><b>Disabling MSN Messenger from starting automatically</b> </p><p>Navigate to User configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Messenger. In the right pane, you will find options to change the settings for this program. Click on 'Do not automatically start windows messenger initially' and enable this rule to prevent starting MSN Messenger when you start Windows. This will shorten your boot up time, and also save memory. </p><p><b>Disabling Windows update</b> </p><p>If you wish to remove the Windows update option, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. You can completely remove this option by enabling 'Remove access to all update features'. </p><p>Note: After you do this, Windows will not prompt you to update, and you cannot manually update from the Web site either. </p><p><b>Removing unnecessary options from Task Manager</b> </p><p>XP hides inactive icons in the system tray by default. In order to remove this facility completely, you will have to navigate to User configuration > Administrative templates > Start menu and Taskbar. On the right-hand side, scroll down to 'Turn off notification area clean up'. Now your icons cannot be hidden at all. </p><p><b>Customising IE interface</b> </p><p>Tired of the same old IE interface? Customise it by going to User configuration > Internet Explorer Maintenance > Browser User Interface. Change the browser title name and manually add the name you want to see on the browser. You can even add a customised animated logo and change the background of the toolbar by going to 'Browser toolbar customisation'. </p><p><b>Removing inactive icons from system tray</b> </p><p>XP hides inactive icons in the system tray by default. In order to remove this facility completely, you will have to navigate to User configuration > Administrative templates > Start menu and Taskbar. On the right-hand side, scroll down to 'Turn off notification area clean up'. Now your icons cannot be hidden at all. </p><p><b>Sharing Internet connection </b> </p><p>If you are connected to a network and want to enable Internet connection sharing, it's easy with Windows XP. Go to Control Panel > Network Connections and click on 'Set up or change your home or small office Internet connection'. A wizard will guide you through the process of creating a connection. If you want this connection to dial automatically, when another computer on your home or small office network attempts to access external resources, check the 'Establish a dial-up connection whenever a computer on my network attempts to access the Internet' option. </p><p>If you want other network users to enable or disable the shared Internet connection, select the 'Allow other network users to control or disable the shared Internet connection' option. </p><p><b>Controlling cookies</b> </p><p>Often, when you visit a Web site, it sends a cookie which is placed on your hard disk. Through the cookie, the site may steal and misuse information from your computer. To prevent this, Internet Explorer 6 comes with an option for blocking these cookies. In order to change this option to suit your requirements, right click on Internet Explorer, go to Properties, and click on the Privacy tab. Here you can select the option you want. For instance, in order to ensure maximum privacy, you can keep it on 'High'-all the cookies that contain your personal information and are sent to third-party Web sites without your consent are now blocked. </p><p><b>Increasing connection speed </b>
Some of us may find that after installing Windows XP, the Internet connection gets slower. A possible reason for this is the QoS (Quality of Service) installed. This service reserves 20 per cent of the bandwidth for itself, even with QoS disabled. In order to remove this reserved quota, you will have to make sure you are logged on as Administrator. Go to Start > Run and type gpedit.msc. Expand the 'local computer policy' branch, the 'administrative templates' branch, and the 'network' branch. Highlight the 'QoS Packet Scheduler' in the left window. In the right window, double-click the 'limit reservable bandwidth' setting. Then, on the Setting tab, check 'enabled', and change the 'Bandwidth limit %' to read 0. After doing this, you should immediately notice a boost in your Internet connection speed.</p>