Hidden Windows XP tools

You may not realise it, but you can start many of Windows XP Professional’s extra functions, however well hidden, straight from a command prompt or the Run dialogue on the Start menu.

The benefit is that this is often a lot quicker than a long series of mouse clicks in an almost impenetrable menu structure.

You’ll find a wide variety of free XP utilities on the XP setup CD and hidden away in the Windows/System32 directory.

In this feature we’ll give you a flavour of the most useful ones. You can get a comprehensive overview of all the hidden applications on your system by using the operating system’s Search feature on the Start menu.

Enter *.exe and *.com as search strings and choose to search in the Windows directory and its subfolders. This will give you a clear listing of all the Microsoft utilities present on your computer.

You might also find third-party applications here, depending on the programs you have installed.

You can easily tell whether a particular program belongs to Microsoft by looking at the description on the Explorer status bar when you highlight the file – alternatively, simply right-click on the file, choose Properties and click the Version tab.

Many of the tools from the System32 folder have extra parameters (also known as switches). Detailed descriptions for many of the programs can be found in Windows XP’s Help and Support Center.

Character map – Charmap.exe

Character map displays all the characters in a particular font in a Windows program window. It is extremely useful when you’re looking for a special character to insert in your text.

The application allows you to select multiple characters to copy at the same time. Once you have found the character you are looking for, highlight it and click the Select button (or just double-click the character) to get it into the ‘Characters to copy’ box and then press the Copy button when you’re ready.

This puts the characters on the Windows clipboard ready for pasting into your application.

Encryption tool – Cipher.exe

This utility detects whether files on an NTFS partition are encrypted with Windows’ EFS (Encrypting File System). You can also use it to encrypt and decrypt files or folders.

If you encrypt a folder, any files that are subsequently added are automatically encrypted too. The encrypted files can only be read, copied or altered by their owner or an administrator.

If you run the Cipher program without using any parameters, it just shows the encryption status of the files in the current directory: ‘E’ before the file name in the results means Encrypted, U means Unencrypted.

If, for example, you want to securely encrypt all the folders in c:\secure, then type the command cipher /e c:\secure. Use the /u switch to decrypt them again.

Note that if you copy a file to a non-encrypted or Fat-formatted disk, folder or partition, the encryption could be lost.

Also, if you try to restore encrypted files from a backup onto a different Windows installation, you won't be able to read the encrypted files unless you’ve backed up your private encryption key.

Disk clean-up – Cleanmgr.exe

Clean Manager is a tool for recovering hard disk space.

It first calculates the amount of space you can claw back by deleting temporary files or compressing old files, then gives you the option of viewing the files affected and lets you choose more advanced options (on the ‘More options’ tab), such as removing Windows components and deleting restoration points.

You always retain full control and you can specify the files to be deleted. In principle, you can safely remove all the suggested files.

However, you should always retain the last system restore point just to be on the safe side.

Compress files – Compact.exe

The Compact command compresses complete folders and individual files. Windows can use data compressed like this without having to decompress it first.

If you enter the command without any parameters, it will show the compression status of every file in the current directory.

If you want to compress a file, say, c:\temp\test.dat, then enter the command compact /c c:\tmp\test.dat. Setting the switch to /u will uncompress the file again.

The editing program for user-defined typographic characters, Eudcedit, is useful for designing your own custom characters, symbols, logos or even whole fonts.

You can use it to make your own Truetype font with up to 6,400 custom characters.

It works like an icon editor. After choosing the character code, paint your symbol into the grid that’s displayed automatically.

If you are happy with the result, you can link (File / Font links) your user-defined symbol with one – or all – of the fonts installed on your computer in order to make it available for use.

Event triggers – Eventtriggers.exe

Windows XP can allocate event triggers to almost any system procedure. If a process that you’ve decided to monitor has a certain outcome, the system can be set to trigger a user-defined task.

Using Eventtriggers, you can define, delete or view trigger events. For example, it is possible to monitor a Windows service and, in the event that it crashes or generates an error, to send a message to the administrator.

Entering the command eventtriggers on its own displays a list of existing event triggers, or typing eventtriggers /create /? will give you online help on creating or deleting a triggered event.

It’s not a particularly simple tool to use and is really aimed at system administrators. For example, to create a trigger that monitors for an ‘Error’ event in the Windows System Event log and then run Disk Cleanup, use the following syntax at a command prompt:

Eventtriggers /Create /TR “Disk Cleanup” /L system /T error /TK c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr.exe

Find strings – Findstr.exe

The command findstr (find strings) searches for character sequences within Ascii text files.

It has a powerful pattern-matching syntax, so you can, for example, look for an occurrence of the combination of letters ABC followed by any character and the letter X, then print out the lines on which this expression occurs.

If you simply want to look for the names of files that contain a particular string, you’ll also find findstr useful.

To do this, there are various switches with which you can control the search. For example, /s makes the search recursive; that is, it will search in all the files and sub-folders in a folder.

You can use /i to turn off the differentiation between capital and small letters, and get a full syntax listing by typing findstr /? at a command prompt.

Messaging – Msg.exe

The msg command allows to you send text messages to one or more users on the same network. If you want to send the message to a specific user, then you should also specify the name of the computer they are currently logged on to.

The message text will appear in a dialogue box on the target computer’s desktop, as long as the Messenger service is running on both PCs – note that this is not the instant-messaging application Windows Messenger, but a separate service.

For example, if you want to send a message to the user named Hubert on the computer called Riverside, type this command into the command prompt window:

msg hubert /SERVER:riverside

Then type in the message text, which can be as long as you want. To mark the end of the text and stop entering text, press the Enter key, so the cursor goes to a new line.

Then press the key combination Ctrl & Z and confirm this by pressing Enter again. After this, the message text is sent immediately to the recipient.

CHECK OUT MY PAGE WITH XP TIPS AND SECRETS HERE

http://www.dominicanvibes.com/xptips.htm