Dec 27
2007The Control Panel - Part 3
Filed Under (Windows Xp) by Admin on 27-12-2007
Tagged Under : Advanced, Advanced Properties, Always On, automatic updates, Computer Name, Control Panel, Device Manager, General, hardware, Maximum Battery Life, microsoft windows xp, Minimal Power Management, Network Setup Wizard, Performance, Phone And Modem Options, Power Options, Remote, Scheduled Tasks, Startup and Recovery, system restore, System Restore Point, UPS settings, User Profiles, Windows Xp
The Network Setup Wizard
Use the Network Setup Wizard to register you computer on a network. Before you proceed with the Wizard, decide on a Workgroup name—it should be a name that describes your area, your housing society, or the department in which you work. Decide on a computer name as well. The Wizard now guides you through the process. The only point at which you may get confused is the type of connection. The Wizard gives a detailed description with illustrations to help you identify your connection. If you think your connection type is not listed, choose ‘Other’ and click ‘Next’. On the screen that follows, you will be able to identify your connection type. Towards the end, the Wizard will try to be friendly and offer you to set up network connections for other computers. Just click ‘Finish the settings and close the wizard’.
Phone And Modem Options
You may not need to run the Phone and Modem settings if your modem has been detected by Windows XP. If it hasn’t, then proceed by double-clicking the icon and enter your area code; leave the rest blank! Click ‘OK’; a new dialog box opens. Choose the ‘Modem’ tab and click ‘Add’ to install a modem. Be ready with the modem drivers. To set up a dial-up connection, double-click on ‘Network Connections’ in the Classic View of the Control Panel and follow the instructions to successfully establish a dial-up connection.
Power Options
Several power-saving schemes are already configured by Windows. You can choose from Home/office, Portable/Laptop, Always On, Minimal Power Management, and Maximum Battery Life. ‘Enable Hibernation’ will allow Windows to turn off the system without affecting your current session; you can resume your PC on startup from where you had left off earlier. This option needs free space on the primary partition.
Use the UPS settings to control the battery usage and the power that your PC will derive from it. The ‘Advanced’ tab allows you to set options such as ‘Turn off the computer when I press the power button’; this will shut down the PC when you press the power button on the cabinet of your machine.
Scheduled Tasks
If you have an anti-virus program installed on your PC, it will make an entry in Scheduled Tasks to run a virus scan at a particular time, every day, week, or month. You can also add tasks such as creating a System Restore Point using the scheduling option. Office PCs may need to take periodic backups of data. Using Scheduled Tasks makes this simpler.
Let’s take the example of scheduling a System Restore Point. Double-click on the ‘Add Schedule Task’ icon. A wizard will pop up—click ‘Next’. On the following screen, you can either choose a program for scheduling from the list it provides, or you can use the ‘Browse’ button to locate a program of your choice. ‘System Restore’ is present in the displayed list; select it and click ‘Next’. Enter a name for the schedule, say ‘Restore Point’, and choose the frequency at which you want to run the schedule from the ‘Perform this Task’ list: ‘Daily’, ‘Weekly’, ‘Monthly’, ‘One time only’, ‘When computer starts’ and ‘When I log on’. Let’s choose ‘Weekly’ and proceeded with the wizard. Specify the time (10:00 AM in our example) and a day of the week (say Friday) in the following screen. Enter your username and password when asked for, and click ‘Next’ to finish adding the schedule. You may choose to open ‘Advanced Properties’ at the end of the Wizard, but this isn’t necessary unless the task demands advanced settings.
System
Managing your computer becomes easy from within the System Properties. Double-click on the ‘System’ icon to open System Properties. This dialog box contains seven tabs—General, Hardware, Advanced, Computer Name, System Restore, Automatic Updates and Remote. The tabs for Hardware and Advanced rank high in order of importance.
The ‘Hardware’ tab contains features such as the Device Manager, which lists all the devices in and attached to your computer, and also provides you with details about them—for example, whether they’re operational, or whether there are conflicts or driver issues. These can be easily identified—Device Manager indicates malfunctioning devices with an exclamation mark. The ‘Advanced’ tab includes settings for Startup and Recovery, User Profiles, and Performance. Most users who know Windows XP well use the Performance settings to configure their systems for faster operation. The most common performance tuning is assigning a fixed range for virtual memory on a FAT32 partition.