XP hides many different devices from you even when the 'show hidden devices' is clicked in the device manager. It will such as a USB stick or a ghosted drive.

Windows has a built in encryption scheme known as EFS. You can put the "encrypt" and "decrypt" entries in the context menu and then encrypting a file is only two clicks away.

When you start Windows, the numberlock (sometimes called NUMLOCK or NMBLOCK) is not activated on your keyboard. So the number pad on the right is being used for scroll keys and cannot be used as a calculator.

Sometimes the OS needs additional files after the OS is installed. It normally gets them off the installation CD. This change allows you to get the files from somewhere else like the hard disk.

The following registry edit will put a context menu (right click) item which will drop you into the CLI at the directory you are looking at in Windows Explorer.

In XPpro you can create a disk to log on to your machine and allow you to reset the password.

Windows XP will choke on a hard-disk that is bigger than 137 Giga Bytes. If you get something bigger you need to add 48 bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing).

There are five directories that Windows uses internally. The contents of those directories are a mystery to most.

One way to is to stop spyware from installing itself by using the 'kill bit' which blocks specific ActiveX controls. It marks that control as incompatible or not runnable.

You may not want to allow someone to shutdown from the Start-up window or from the command line.