Those of you that were around when M$ moved from NT 3.51 to 4.0 might remember learning all the new locations for settings and utilities. Of coarse Windows 95 came out some time earlier and served as a guide to the direction we were headed. None the less, over the past few years or so Microsoft must have felt we had grown soft as admins and needed to shake things up a little. What better way to do that than moving all our utilities and configuration settings around again.

So now that XP has been out a few months, I'm sure everyone has seen the mad rush of corporations to adopt the new OS. No? Me either actually. Never the less, might as well start figuring out how to install and config the dammed thing now so you don't look like a moron later.

The installation...well, if you can't hack yer way thru that, then u really are a moron and should hire a professional. Getting it configured however...that's another story. The following are some of the things I've found so far:

There is a group policy editor called gpedit.msc loaded automagicly and ready for your enjoyment. Might want to delete it though, if you don't want some admin wannabe locking down machines to the point of reinstall.

Having trouble figuring out how to set up shares that aren't WIDE open? So was I. Uncheck the "Use simple file sharing" setting in the bottom of the "Advanced Settings" section.

Call me crazy, but maybe you don't want all the crap that MS want's installed on all your machines on all your machines. I don't know, maybe yer boss wouldn't be to keen on the answer to "why do all our minimum wage call center phone jockeys have pinball installed on their machines?" being "well, i don't know how to get it off." sure you can just del the shortcut, but if you really want control of that shit, check out "windows\inf\sysoc.inf". In the components section you will see all the things you were forced to load. Now check out the forth field on each record. The ones that say "HIDE" are hidden in yer add/remove proggies util. Edit as you see fit.

That should get most of your machs configied. If you wanna really start diddling with form and function, pull on yer waders and crack open the reg. Here are couple of handy hacks.

Trivia question: what does the "H" in "HKEY" stand for?

Hint: it's not for "Honey"

One of the things I began to notice is that the "My Computer" window lists all your shares up front. Well, that's usually the last stuff I'm looking for if I'm logged in localy. So let's make it go away already: Look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\My Computer\NameSpace\DelegateFolders and you'll see a sub-key named {59031a47-3f72-44a7-89c5-5595fe6b30ee}. If you delete this, all of the Shared Documents folders (which are normally under the group called "Other Files Stored on This Computer") should be gone.

Want to stop Windows Messenger from starting on boot? Delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\MSMSGS reg key.

So, that's some of the basics. There are dozens of other tweaks filtering around the Web, but most address issues too specific for the scope of this article. Feel free to post the reg edits you've found and find usefull here.

...and before i forget -

Trivia question answer: it stands for "Hive". during development, the developers envisioned the registry as a bee hive, with all its compartments.

l8rz - tX