How to Customize Your Windows XP

Having worked with so many Windows XP operating systems, I get bored of seeing the same boring look of XP and there was never once when I didn't got rid of it. I like removing the shut down menu because quite often, people would go and turn off the computer when I had just gone away for a couple of minutes or when I left it to be running some processes. The error reporting dialog box is also rather annoying as I never send the errors.

There are many things you can do to make Windows XP work, look and behave just the way you want. These include: changing your boot screen, changing your login screen, using different themes and different visual styles, changing the icons used on your computer instead of the old boring windows icons. You may also download many different mouse cursors.

Many good programs for customizing Windows XP are Style XP, Boot skins, Cursor XP and Icon Packager. All these programs are rather easy to use and self - explanatory. A good site to download resources for these programs and others is http://wincustomize.com

Some of these programs are not free but do come with a trial, like StyleXP for instance, but there are many free programs which will do one, if not all of the functions that Style XP possess, so if after the trial runs out and you need to change something, you can search for the process to find the program.

Other things you can do to customize Windows XP include removing the shut down menu, disabling error reporting.

To remove the shut down menu:
Click on the Start button then go to run, type in GPedit.msc (GP is Group Policy). Select User Configuration in either the tree on the side or the main view. Then choose administrative templates, again, either in the tree or main view. Click on the start menu and task bar option. You will then see a list, you click the 'Remove SHUT DOWN on the start menu' option, double click it and then when a small window opens, select the radio button that says 'ENABLED' and click apply. Doing this remove shut down, hibernate, log off and restart from the start menu, the task manager (the box that comes up when you press CTRL + ALT + DEL.

To shut down your computer after removing the menu, you can either open the directory, C:\WINDOWS\system32 and selecting shut down, run C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe. You can also create the shortcut to it on the desktop. C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -s, use this to make a shortcut for shutdown and restart is C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -r.

Note: for C:\WINDOWS\system32, if your root drive is not C: or you've changed it, use %systemroot%\system32\ and then the appropriate ending.

To disable error reporting, because we all know it's a rather annoying box, click on start and RIGHT click on My Computer, the system properties box will come up, select the advanced tab. You will see the Error Reporting button at the bottom of the box, click it and another dialog box pop up. Choose 'Disable error reporting', also check 'But notify me when critical error occur', this like it says, for when critical errors occur.