10.1 User Interface Tweaks

The user interface for Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 is customizable in a lot of small ways. You can't easily change the standard way windows and menus work, for example, but you can change their colors. In that spirit, there are several adjustments you can make to change some basics of how you and the operating system interact with one another.

10.1.1 Add Your Own "Tip of the Day"

Microsoft Word for Windows introduced the "Tip of the Day" feature, which presents an ostensibly helpful tip every time you start a tip-enabled application. This feature made it into Windows 95, Office 95, NT 4.0, and a raft of third-party applications. Apart from disabling the feature altogether (which you can do with the "Don't show tips at startup" checkbox in the Tip of the Day dialog), you can add your own set of tips. This is particularly useful when you make this change as part of a system policy; you can build your own set of tips that are specific to your local environment, then remove the ability for users to turn the tips off. This is an easy, and cheap, way to disseminate information to your users. The list of tips is stored as a set of values under:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Tips

The tip values are stored as sequentially named REG_SZ values; the first one is named "0," and the names go up from there. You can replace any of the existing tips included with NT by changing that tip's value; alternatively, you can replace all of them by removing all the values under Tips and replacing them with your own.

However, the tip list is only half of the necessary change. There's also a pair of REG_BINARY values that control whether tips are displayed and which tip comes next. These values are stored in HKCU, so they can be different for every individual user. Here's how they work:

HKCU \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Tips\Show

Controls whether tips are shown at startup or not. A value of 00000000 disables the tip display, while 01000000 enables it.

HKCU \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Tips\Next

Controls which tip appears next. Its value is a sequence number that must match the name of a value in the tips list. A value of 00000000 displays tip 0, 01000000 displays tip 1, 0c000000 displays tip 12, and so on. NT automatically increments and updates this value as each tip is displayed.

10.1.2 Disable Window Animations

Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 copy the Win95 habit of using animated rectangles to provide a "zooming" effect when windows are opened and closed. However, after the first few times you've seen this effect it can become annoying; it also causes a slight but perceptible slowdown as the system draws all the fancy rectangles instead of just closing the window directly.

If you want to disable this animation for Windows 2000, you may do so by adding the REG_SZ value HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\MinAnimate and setting its value to 0. NT 4.0 users should to add this value as a REG_DWORD type. If you later decide that you like the animations after all, setting MinAnimate back to 1 turns it back on.

10.1.3 Speed Up the Taskbar

The Taskbar is a useful addition to the standard user interface. When Apple was designing the Macintosh interface, their research found that a single menu bar at the top or bottom of the screen was the fastest menu system; instead of having to carefully guide the mouse to a particular area, you can just slam it down (or up) to the menu region without any need for precise control. The Taskbar's default location at the bottom of the screen satisfies this. One failing of the Taskbar, however, is the speed with which the Start menu (and other menus attached to Taskbar items) pops up. In a word, it's slow. Fortunately, the speed is adjustable via a Registry change.

To adjust the Taskbar pop-up speed, add a REG_SZ value named MenuShowDelay to HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop. This value determines the number of milliseconds the shell pauses before displaying the Taskbar. By default, it's set to "400," which is a 0.4-second delay. Adjust it to your taste, then reboot to make the change take effect.

10.1.4 Enable Tab for Filename Completion

If you're a Unix administrator or programmer, you'll love this one. Many Unix shells allow you to quickly complete filenames in the shell by using the Tab key. For example, if you type ls -l aar and hit the Tab key, the shell looks for files whose names start with "aar." If it finds one, it automatically expands what you typed into the full file or directory name. This is a lifesaver, especially since Unix allows you to have very long file and pathnames with embedded spaces--just like Windows 2000 and NT.

This behavior is specified by the REG_DWORD value HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar. Set it to the hex value of the character you want to use for filename completion. To use the Tab key, set its value to 0x09. While other characters may fill in as the completion character, such as Ctrl-D (0x04), the Tab key is familiar and otherwise unused in the command window.

Setting this Registry value enables completion for all invocations of the command processor. However, if you run the command processor with the file and directory name-completion characters option explicitly enabled (cmd /F:ON ), the default completion characters are used, rather than the value in the CompletionChar Registry setting. The default control characters are Ctrl-D for directory name completion and Ctrl-F for file name completion.

10.1.5 Run a Different Screen Saver While Waiting for a Logon

You probably know you can use the "Screen Savers" tab of the Display control panel to set a screen saver to be run after a specified period of inactivity. You can also choose which screen saver runs while a Windows 2000 or NT machine is waiting for a logon. The default choice displays the familiar "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to log in" dialog, complete with the three-fingered hand icon, but you can easily choose another.

Some of the screen savers bundled with Windows 2000 and NT are CPU hogs. If you're choosing a logon screen saver for a server, make sure you stick with the "blank screen" saver; otherwise, your server's valuable CPU cycles are used to draw OpenGL objects or flying stars, robbing your server of the power it needs to handle your users.

If you want to use another screen saver while your operating system is waiting for someone to log on locally, you need to make three changes. First of all, add HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaveActive as a REG_SZ; set its value to 1. This tells the system that when no one's logged in (for example, when the .DEFAULT profile's being used), you want a screen saver to run. Under NT 4.0, add this key as a REG_DWORD value instead.

Next, edit the value of HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\SCRNSAVE.EXE to specify the full path of the screen saver you want to run. (If the screen saver you want is in the default location of %systemroot%\system32, you don't have to enter the full path.) For example, you might enter sstars.scr to run the "flying stars" screen saver.

Finally, edit the value of HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSave-TimeOut and enter a value for the screen-saver trigger time. This value, in seconds, specifies the amount of inactivity you're willing to allow before the screen saver kicks in.

Once you make the changes, you must reboot before they take effect.

10.1.6 Enable X Window-Style "Auto Raise"

The X Window system has a neat configuration setting called "auto-raise." When this setting's in effect, you don't have to click on a window to bring it to the front of the window stack. Instead, just passing the mouse over a window raises it. This takes a little getting used to, but once you've made the adjustment, you'll find that it eliminates a lot of extra mouse clicks.

NT does something similar: it can automatically set the focus to a window when you put the mouse in it, but it won't raise that window to the top of the stack. This setting is off by default to avoid confusing people who haven't been exposed to auto-raise before. To turn it on, set the value of HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse\ActiveWindowTracking to 1. You have to log out and log back on before the change takes effect.

10.1.7 Enable "Snap to Default Button"

Some X Window system implementations also have another handy feature: you can force the cursor to always jump to the default button of any dialog or alert that appears. This speeds the process of moving the cursor from wherever it happens to be to the dialog or alert, especially if you're using a high-resolution monitor or an input device that makes it hard to move the cursor quickly.

You can enable or disable this behavior by adjusting the value of HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse\SnapToDefaultButton. When this value is 0, as it is by default, no snapping occurs. Set it to 1, though, and the cursor warps to the default button once you log out and log back on. Try it--you may like it.

10.1.8 Suppress Error Messages During Boot and Logon

During a Windows 2000 or NT boot process, it's not uncommon to see error dialogs reporting problems that occurred during startup. For example, you may see warnings telling you that a device driver couldn't be started, or that some other system component didn't do what it was supposed to do. You can suppress these error dialogs with a simple Registry change; the errors are still logged in the system and application sections of the event log, but the dialogs won't interrupt or intrude on the boot and logon process.

The actual errors are displayed in two phases; their display is thus controlled by two separate Registry values. Messages that pop up on Windows 2000 as the result of errors in the boot phase are controlled by the value HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\NoPopUpsOnBoot. In the Windows NT 4.0 Registry, the NoPopUpsOnBoot key is found at HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\NoPopUpsOnBoot. Add this value as a REG_DWORD and give it a value of 1 to suppress boot errors, or to allow the normal error dialog display.

Messages that appear as part of the post-boot startup phase (including messages produced by most device drivers and services) are controlled by a different value, HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\ErrorMode or, for NT 4.0, HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\ErrorMode. Set this REG_DWORD value to to allow all system and application errors to display dialogs, 1 to display only application errors, or 2 to suppress all error dialogs. The default value is 0.

10.1.9 Set NUMLOCK Key During Startup

You can specify whether the NUMLOCK key is on or off when the computer starts through the HKCU\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators value. InitialKeyboardIndicators is a REG_SZ type that, when set to 2, causes the NUMLOCK key to be on when the user logs on. Setting the value to ensures the key is off.

10.1.10 Display Version Number

A simple desktop tweak allows you to display the Windows 2000 version number and build number in the lower right corner of the desktop. Set the REG_DWORD value HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\PaintDesktopVersion to 1 to show the OS build information.