In the
Belly of the Beast
By David Shamah,
The
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
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