Accounts Password Protection
To keep children and others from logging on to your own user accounts, you should establish a password to protect the account by clicking Start and Control Panel, double-clicking the User Accounts icon, and clicking the Change An Account link. Next select the account for which you want to establish a password and click the Create A Password link. Now follow the on-screen instructions to type and retype your password and type a word or phrase WinXP can use as a hint in case you forget it. Lastly, you must click the Create Password button to activate the password protection.

Address Book
One of the little known aspects of Windows is its excellent address book. To open the Address Book, you must click Start, Programs (All Programs in WinXP), Accessories, and Address Book. Address Book's forms allow you to enter personal and business information. There also is space for extensive notes. Address Book is available in WinXP/98/ME.

Administrator Login
Some computer users have had difficulty finding the Administrator login, which is normally part of every XP system. If you're using the "friendly" graphical login screen for XP, the Admin account is usually suppressed: You see only the named user accounts on the system. But you can still access the Admin account by clicking Ctrl-Alt- Del at the login screen. It may take several tries to break out of the friendly login process, but eventually the box. You can type any valid account name into the first field, including Administrator. Finally, enter the password in the second line and click to enter.

Backup
WinXP Home comes with a free program to backup your data. MS installs it by default with WinXP Professional, but doesn't do it with WinXP Home. Therefore WinXP Home doesn't list this option in the System Tools folder. To add this backup utility to your computer, put the XP installation CD in your drive and then navigate to folder D:\Valueadd\msft\ntbackup. Note the assumption is that your CD drive is the D drive. If it has another letter, substitute that letter. Now look for a file called ntbackup.msi in that folder and click on it. This step should start up the installation program. Henceforth, you will find Backup under System Tools.

CD Burning
Burning a CD in WinXP takes a lot of room on your hard drive because Windows Media Player 9 has to convert the songs into a format that works on audio CDs. If you don't have an extra 700 to 800MB of free space on your main hard drive to accommodate the process, click Start, My Computer, right-click your CD-R drive, and click Properties, Recording. When the CD Drive Properties dialog box appears, change the drive where Windows can store an "image." This space on the new drive is used only temporarily. It has to be on a hard drive because the CD burning process can't be interrupted. There won't be a problem if you have to copy numerous files to another computer on your network, or even compress some files to make room for the temporary image area. You can always move them back later. While the recording session is under way, don't perform any other tasks because the CD burning routine requires most of the computer's resources.

Character Map
The Windows Character Map lets you add accented characters to foreign words. To get to the Character Map, go to your Start Character Map comes to the screen, all the letters and characters are small and hard to read. To better see them, hold down your mouse button while moving the pointer over the characters in Character Map. When you hold down the mouse button, a magnified view of the characters pops to the forefront for easy viewing or you can just click once on any of the characters. When you move your arrow keys, a magnified view of the foreign character pops up wherever you move your arrow keys. If you don't have the Character Map on your computer, go to the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs icon and install the program there under System Tools.

ClearType
Some people have a problem when they view type on a flat-panel monitor. A process called anti-aliasing is used to smooth the edges of type. It doesn't work as well on flat-panels as on old-style CRT monitors. Fortunately MS recognizes the problem and includes in WinXP a feature called ClearType. It can make the type on your flat-panel much more readable for you. This improvement may also be worthwhile on a CRT. To access ClearType, press the Windows key and the letter "d" to go to the desktop. Next right-click anywhere on an empty area of the desktop, click Properties, select the Appearance tab, and click Effects. Check the box marked "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts." In the dropdown box, choose ClearType. Next, ClearType has to be fine-tuned. You can do that on MS' Web site and view examples of type for your use cleartype tuner. Displays vary slightly among monitors. Selecting the type that looks best for you is an easy way to match ClearType to your monitor. To select it, just click your preference. People using Win98/ME should be sure they have enabled the font-smoothing feature. To use it, right-click on the desktop and from the pop-up menu, select Properties, click the Effects tab, and then check the box next to "Smooth edges of screen fonts."

Computer Recovery
If Win2000/XP refuses to start, press F8 right after you turn on your PC but before the Windows logon appears. At the resulting menu, select "Last Known Good Configuration" to restore your Registry to an earlier date. If this procedure doesn't get your PC working, then reboot and press F8 again, but this time select "Safe Mode," and then choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. If this approach also doesn't work, then use your emergency boot floppy. If your hard drive's boot sector or Windows' basic boot files have been corrupted, this disk will circumvent the problem and boot you into Windows. If the emergency boot floppy doesn't work, you can try the Recovery Console, a Windows utility that provides a DOS like command line from which you can run some repair programs. If you have a MS Windows CD-ROM, you can get to the Recovery Console by booting from that CD and pressing any key when told to "Press any key to boot from CD." At the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press r Repair.

CTRL-Alt-Delete
This three key combination has been used in the past with previous versions of Windows to reboot your computer. This combination won't work with WinXP except to get you the Task Manager. If you want to restart your WinXP operating system, right-click the desktop, pick New from the menu, and then select Shortcut. In the New Shortcut wizard location box, type shutdown r t 0, and press Enter. If you want to do the same kind of trick for a shutdown, type shutdown s t 0. To put an icon on your desktop that'll shut down your machine quickly, right-click any empty location on the desktop and click New, Shortcut. When the Create Shortcut Wizard appears, in the "Type the Location of the Item" box, type shutdown -s - t 0. It's important that you put spaces before each hyphen, have no spaces after each hyphen, use a zero at the end, and click Next. In the "Type a Name for This Shortcut" box, use a name that will remind you that this button is for a very quick shut down, and click Finish. You have a new shortcut on your desktop. Right-click the shortcut and click Properties, click the Change Icon button, pick an appropriate icon for the shortcut and double-click it. Click OK, and your new, quick shut down shortcut will appear on the desktop. To test the new, fast shut down icon, make sure no programs are running, and doubleclick it. On a typical machine, you'll see the log-off screen in about three seconds. After another two or three seconds, you'll get the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" message. Windows will give you a short period of time to save changes.

Error Reporting Message
This message allows you to tell Microsoft every time something crashes in WinXP. If you want to get rid of that message, click Start, right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced and click Error Reporting. Now select Disable Error Reporting and click OK twice. If you select Disable Error Reporting, you can still be notified when critical errors occur with your computer. To see the list of errors, go to System Tools folder under Accessories. Now launch the System Information applet, expand the Software Environment node, and then highlight Windows Error Reporting.

Fax
To send and receive faxes on your computer, you'll need a regular phone line and a dial-up modem. To send faxes that do not originate inside your computer, like a magazine article, you'll need a scanner. WinXP has fax software, but it isn't automatically installed on your computer. However, you can install it by opening the Control Panel and double clicking Add or Remove Programs. Next click Add/Remove Windows Components to start the Windows Components Wizard. In the Components list, click to select the Fax Services check box, and then click Next. Setup installs the Fax services. If prompted, insert the MS WinXP program disc and then click OK. On completing the Windows Components Wizard screen, click Finish. Close the Add or Remove Programs dialog box. To configure faxing capability, click Start, point to All Programs, Accessories, Communications, Fax, and click Fax Console. When the Fax Configuration Wizard starts, you just follow the prompts.

Finally, to transfer files from an old computer using an operating system other than XP to one with XP, this task can be done with the help of WinXP's Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. This program not only will move files you need from one computer to another, but it will also transfer e-mail and Web settings. The wizard comes on the WinXP CD. You just put it into the old computer to run the wizard. It will then gather all of the necessary information and put this data in a WinXP format. Once you have run the wizard, be ready to copy the data to a CD or connect to a network to transfer this information. The specific steps for this exchange are as follows: 1. Insert your WinXP CD into the old computer's CD drive. You will next see a screen with numerous options. You will want the one called Perform Additional Tasks. 2. Now select Transfer Files and Settings. Once it starts the wizard just follow the questions/ instructions.