Hello readers, here goes the first post of Gravity Blue and i am sure, all of you guys out there will love it. Yesterday, i was going through some forums, where i found these fun things to try out with your Windows XP and i thought about sharing it with you guys.

Here is a list of Hidden Programs in Windows XP which might not have even heard before.

- Character Editor: This program can be used to design icons and characters. To open it, click the start button on your bottom-left screen and click on run. Type “EUDCEDIT” without adding ” ” and hit enter.

- iExpress is the second hidden tool which coverts your files to executable(.exe) files. To open, again, click start button, move to run, and type in “iexpress”, without adding the ” ” and again hit enter.

- You might have heard of Disk Cleanup which clear your hard drive to offer more space, if your hard drive is getting full. Click start, then run, and type in “cleanmgr”, without adding the ” “.

- Dr Watson, is the fourth program, used to repair any problem with your widows. Click start, then run and type “drwtsn32″

Also, there are some softwares which comes with Windows XP installation, like windows messenger, and does not appear in your Add/Remove Programs list but now you can remove these sort of unwanted applications that are taking up your hard drive space and are never or hardly used. To do that, you have to edit the text file at C:/windows/inf/sysoc.inf. Open this file in notepad and search the word ‘hide’ and then remove it. Now, when you have edited the file, go to Control Panel and then Add/Remove Programs. From there, select Add/Remove Windows Components and you will find all the applications you have always wanted to remove.

Another interesting thing i found out was how to rename the Recycle Bin icon. To do that, click start, then to go to Run, and type in “Regedit” and hit Enter on your keyboard. It will open Registry Editor. Now go to:

HKEY_CLASSES_ ROOT/CLSID/ {645FF040- 5081-101B- 9F08-00AA002F954 E}

and then change the name “Recycle Bin” to whatever you want but remember not to type in any quotes in the name.

Most of the people using Windows XP usually complain of slow boot up after sometime and now you can improve that booting time. There are number of reasons why Windows XP take alot of time booting up, major reason is the time taken to load the applications at start up which takes alot of resources and slows down your pc. To speed up that process, try removing the useless applications from start up. To do that, go to start, run and type “msconfig”, without quotes, and to go the start up tab. There you can select/unselect the applications you want to load each time you start your pc. You may consider unselecting the useless software like quiktime, if you are using it. Trust me, it really helps your pc speed up.

Also, you can customize the Logon prompt box with own words. To do that, open registry by going to Start, run and type in “regedit” and then go to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINESOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NTCurrentVersion Winlogon]

In the right pane, look for key with the name “LogonPrompt” and there, you can set its value to whatever you want to display at the login screen.

Hope you liked the post and found out interesting stuff to do with your Windows XP, i sure did =) Also, remeber to subscribe to my feed to catch all the new interesting entries =)