In the Belly of the Beast

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 6, 2004

 

It’s a dark, foggy night. You walk alone – there’s not another person on the eerily silent path. All around you the shadows dance, the streetlights flicker, and the sounds of your footfalls echo across the silicon canyons. You adjust your hat, raise the collar of your trench coat, and keep your eyes directly in front of you. But what’s this? In your peripheral vision, you sense… movement! Vaguely familiar figures seem to be darting this way and that. You can’t focus in on any one item, but you feel - you can practically touch - an alien presence all around you. You quickly turn – but no, it’s just the same, empty, lonely drag. 

 

And so you continue, ever deeper into the gloom. On and on it goes. There are a million stories in the naked computer, and they’re all different. But they all end up the same – with you slogging through Windows’ back alleys, searching for ways to make your system run more efficiently, or to enable a feature that would be very useful to you in your daily tasks, but somehow wasn’t installed properly the first time. Trench coat collar raised against the elements, you travel craggy recesses of Windows in a hard-boiled drama replete with intrigue, ennui, cigar smoke, and the occasional George Raft impersonator endlessly calling you a “dirty rat.”

 

Welcome to Windows, the original noir operating system. Oh, of course Gates and company tries to put a happy, sunny face on its OS – as if everything’s out on the table, clear and simple. The Windows interface is called “Explorer,” as if you’re discovering a brave, new clean and safe world. But there’s a whole back end of Windows – call it the “other side of the tracks” – that right-thinking people usually stay away from. It’s like a “bad” neighborhood – it’s scary, the residents look at you like you don’t belong there, and it’s real easy to get in trouble. But there’s no way to avoid traveling or working in this part of Windows – sometimes, in order to get your work done, you have to screw up your courage, and get out into the muck, all the while praying that you come back in one piece.

 

Try to look at Windows not as it appears, a user-friendly desktop that you use to launch programs and run screensavers on. The system has a whole set of innards that determine how fast and securely you work; and when you install your system, you find that Microsoft has made many choices for you in terms of how you work with your system. There’s no malevolence here; Microsoft engineers probably figured, rightly, that the majority of users wouldn’t care. But some of us do care; for example, we want to take one picture and set it up as wallpaper stretched across the width of the screen, as opposed to having the picture at a fixed size repeated on the desktop; some of us are more comfortable using the right mouse button, so we want to use that button to double-click and open a file; many of us do not appreciate having our IE and Outlook hijacked by MSN Messenger and it’s incessant advertisements and upgrade recommendations (ditto for ICQ and AOL Messenger); and dammit, not all of us are enamored of ol’ Paper Clip, that nudnik who won’t leave us alone when we use Office, and we would do anything to get rid of him!

 

Then there are the security issues. Would you believe that Windows Media Player v.9 can (and probably does) send information to Microsoft about what music and videos you are looking at and listening to? That anonymous users can check out your computer’s log files? Everyone’s worried about viruses these days; do you know you can take away Outlook Express’s ability to open .exe attachments? How to permanently disable one of the most widely exploited holes allowing unlimited popups on your computer, the Windows Messenger Service (not the same as Microsoft Messenger)?

 

Unfortunately, some of what we supposedly don’t care about eats up lots of time and system resources, not to mention putting our computers and work at risk. When things aren’t going as fast as we’d like them, as fast as we’ve seen them work on other people’s computers, as fast as we KNOW they should go, the majority of us just start tapping out fingers, waiting for things to fix themselves. Usually they do, eventually, and all that’s lost is a few seconds; but life is too precious to wasted on someone’s idea of “proper” default settings, if you ask me. I want the freedom to decide how I am going to computer, on my own terms – not according to what some programmer somewhere decided I would probably want!

 

Now that we have decided that it’s time for a little Freedom of Computing, what are we going to do about it? Well, all of these little annoyances can be adjusted via Registry settings. But who has the time or patience to hunt down every little Registry adjustment that needs to be made? And of course, each time you make a change, you need to back up the previous, working Registry copy, in case anything goes wrong. Registry editing is a terrifying experience for many people, and they’d rather just not bother with it. It’s the cyber-equivalent of taking a midnight stroll in Central Park: “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

 

But having Registry-phobia does not mean that you have to be stuck with a second-rate computing experience. In the computer biz, the little enhancements designed to make your computing life easier, faster and safer are called “tweaks,” and there is a whole software sub-industry consisting of programs that will automatically enter your Windows system and change all sorts of default settings. And I found a really comprehensive and clear tweaker at http://www.x9000.net, called XENtweak, which, along with it’s sister program, XEN, will help ensure that you can safely stroll the dark corners of the registry with your head held high!

 

XEN and XENTweak have so many features it’s hard to know where to begin, but the differences between them and other tweaking programs is noticeable before you actually tweak anything. Both programs are extremely small (about 350 K) and require very little memory to run, and they do not get installed as programs, but rather run directly from a command window. This makes a great deal of sense for a program suite that is designed to clean up your registry and hard drive, among other things. With its basic input interface, though, XEN and XENtweak drill down to the guts of the Registry and many of your computer’s applications.  XEN does a better job of cleaning your recycle bin, temp files, cookies, etc. than any other program I can think of, not to mention any free program. This thing is thorough! XEN can eliminate all traces of your file history (in almost any program on your computer), eliminate search terms you've put into Google, eliminate your Media Player history, document use history, open/save history, and makes short shrift of your computer’s “hidden” files, like index.dat, etc. It can also easily and quickly backup your registry, Outlook files, or even your entire hard drive!

 

The recycle bin reserves about 10% of your hard disk space for itself. Are you short on space? Would you like to use some of that wasted reserved space? XENtweak can do this trick, along with hundreds of others. Examples: If you find your system hanging upon restart, it could be that Windows’ Autochk utility is being activated, trying to complete unfinished tasks; shorten the delay with XENtweak. Quickly enable/disable Windows hotkeys; disable MS Messenger from starting up automatically in XP; rename your recycle bin to something else (like “garbage?”); Disable the Windows welcome window; and so and so on. Not to mention the actions I described above (preventing Media Player from broadcasting your music choices, removing from Outlook the ability to open executables, etc.). If there is anything you have ever wanted to change on your computer, regardless of how obscure, chances are that XENtweak can do it.

 

And, you can also download the author’s paper on the inner workings of Windows and just how these tweaks will improve your system. The 200 plus pages in “Tweaking and Optimizing Windows” will fill you in on the geekiest aspects of what Windows is all about, but it’s fascinating reading - you won’t be able to put it down! Finally – the long, scary night your computer’s been living through is over. Now, you’re a creature of the night – you’ve mastered the Registry’s back roads, and you can give your trench coat a much needed dry-cleaning!

 

Download XEN, XENtweak and “Tweaking and Optimizing Windows” for free from http://www.x9000.net; for all Windows systems.

 

Questions and comments to ds@newzgeek.com or http://www.newzgeek.com