Few Important Tweaks

Driver Signing

It’s a pain to be prompted by Windows warning you about “unsigned drivers” whenever you need to install third party drivers for hardware. No, there’s nothing wrong with installing “unsigned drivers”. They merely lack Microsoft’s stamp of approval. The only thing the prompts are good at is slowing down a driver installation. Here’s the simple fix that gets rid of those annoying prompts.

Right click “My Computer” and click “Properties”. Go to the “Hardware” tab and click on “Driver Signing”. Select “Ignore” for the action. You will never be bothered by those pesky prompts again.

Error Reporting

On the occasion that a program, or even the entire Operating System experiences a crash, you are greeted with a prompt to send an error report back to Microsoft. I don’t know about everybody else, but most of the time when I get this, it isn’t usually the Operating System’s fault and I would never bother to send a report.

To turn off this prompting, go to Control Panel > System >“Advanced” tab and click “Error Reporting”. Select “Disable Error Reporting”, but leave “But notify me when a critical error occurs” checked, for it’s sometimes a good idea to see it and it sometimes give a clue as to what happened.

IE’s Image Auto-Resize

Whenever IE6 comes across an odd sized image or an image that is larger than the viewable screen, it resizes the image to fit. Many people would much rather view images at their true size, so here’s how to avoid it. In IE, go to Tools > Internet Options and select the “Advanced” tab. Scroll down to the “Multimedia Options” and uncheck “Enable Automatic Image Resizing”.

Logon Background

If you are one of those people who choose to disable the Windows XP Welcome screen (or are simply running Windows 2000) and want to replace the old boring background that appears with the login dialog, this tweak will do the trick. This sets the background for the login screen only, and is separate from the desktop background.

First, open up regedit and navigate to this registry key: HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop. On the right panel there should be a string value named “Wallpaper” (if not, simply create it). Double click on it and enter the full path to a bitmap (bmp) file that is going to be used for the background. For example: C:/Documents and Settings/Bob/My Documents/picture.bmp.

If you would like to tile the wallpaper, double click on the string value “TileWallpaper” and set the value to 1 (a value of 0 turns off tiling). If you would like to stretch the wallpaper, double-click the string value “WallpaperStyle” and set the value to 2 (the “TileWallpaper” value must be a 0 for this to work)

Finally, if you just wish to change the background color instead of setting a background image, go to: HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Colors. Double click on the “Background” string value and change the values.

The values are in R G B; the default should be something similar to 0 78 152, meaning the Red component is 0; Green is 78; and Blue is 152.

Low Disk Space Balloon Warning

Some of you may have gotten this before if you have a hard drive nearing its capacity. XP will notify you via a balloon warning, notifying you of the situation and inviting you to clean up your disk. It can be very annoying. There are two remedies for the problem. The first is to go out a buy another hard drive. The second is this quick registry edit: Open up regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer. Create a new DWORD value called “NoLowDiskSpaceChecks”, give it a value of 1, and reboot. You won’t be seeing that pesky balloon warning again.