Windows XP Tips and Tricks
What drivers are running on my machine?
Here is a great built-in Windows XP utility that will list all of the
drivers running on your system. It won't do much beyond that, but it
really is helpful to have a list all in one place. By the way, the list
can even be exported as a CSV file if you want to import it into a spreadsheet
for further analysis.
You can do the same thing (one driver at a time) in device manager,
but there's no way there to look at all of the drivers ... you have to look at
them by device (one device at a time).
- Open a command prompt window
- Type driverquery on the command line
If you want the output to be a comma-delimited file, issue the command like
this:
Driverquery /v /fo csv > drivers.csv
One note: This utility only works in Windows XP Pro ... it does not
work in Windows XP Home.
msconfig on Steroids
Here is a good utility that will let you get rid of web hijackers or any
other startup nemesis. It's more configurable than msconfig but also
more dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. Be careful with it.
It doesn't distinguish between good candidates for removal and critical system
apps. The utility is called
Hijack This and
is available for free download.
VPNs and Error 619
Here's something I ran into recently. I was setting up a VPN (using
PPTP) to allow me to access my home network from the outside. I set up
the VPN on my Windows Server 2003 but couldn't access it from inside the LAN
(the first place I tested ... I hadn't even tried from outside the LAN yet).
I got an Error 619 each time I tried to connect. After spending the
whole day on a variety of Google searches, I finally happened onto one post on
a forum where the individual said that he had solved this identical problem by
stopping his Cisco VPN client service. Since I use the client to access
my work network, that rang a bell. I had always thought that the Cisco
VPN client ran as an application but, low and behold, I looked in services and
it was, indeed, running. As soon as I stopped the service, then ran my
XP VPN connection, everything worked flawlessly.
The moral of the story? If you are running two VPN clients at the
same time, you could have some issues.
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