Windows XP and 2000 Tips & Tricks UPDATE--July 7, 2003

Windows XP and 2000 Tips & Tricks UPDATE, July 7, 2003, —brought to you by the Windows & .NET Magazine Network and the Windows 2000 FAQ site
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1. Commentary

2. FAQs

3. Announcements

4. Event

5. Contact Us

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1. Commentary
by John Savill, FAQ Editor, [email protected]

Commentary text

2. FAQs

Q. How can I modify the date format on a Windows machine for new users?

A. New users inherit the date format values that were established for the default user when Windows was installed on the machine. To modify the date format (e.g., so that the date appears as day/month/year instead of month/day/year), perform the following steps:

Q. How can I defragment the hiberfil.sys file in Windows 2000 and later?

A. Windows uses the hiberfil.sys file for system hibernation. By design, the OS's built-in disk defragmenter utility and most third-party products, such as Executive Software's Diskeeper, won't defragment hiberfil.sys when you attempt optimize the disk that contains the file. However, SysInternals' free PageDefrag tool does defragment the file. If you don't want to use a third-party product to defragment hiberfil.sys, you can delete the hibernation file, defragment the disk, then recreate the hibernation file by performing the following steps:

Other files that the Windows disk defragmenter utility doesn't defragment are

If the disk that you're defragmenting has less than 15 percent free space available, the disk defragmenter won't completely defragment the volume; instead, the utility will complete only a partial defragmentation. Also, you can't defragment a drive that's marked as possibly having errors (run chkdsk : /f to resolve this problem).

Q. Can I use the Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard and mouse adapter to connect other Bluetooth devices?

A. No, the type of adapter on the Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is suitable only for mouse and keyboard connectivity. Additional information about this type of Bluetooth adapter (i.e., the TDK USB Bluetooth adapter) is available at the TDK Systems Web site (follow the links to Products/Bluetooth).

Q. Why did the volume control icon disappear from my taskbar notification area in Windows XP?

A. To display the volume icon in the taskbar notification area, you must select the "Place volume icon in the taskbar" check box in Control Panel Sounds and Audio Devices applet. If, when you try to select this check box, you receive the error

ErrorWindows cannot display the volume control on the taskbar because the Volume Control program has not been installed. To install it, use Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.

you need to copy the sndvol32.exe image from your commercial XP installation media (not a vendor-supplied "recovery" CD-ROM) to the system32 folder by performing the following steps:

Q. How can I display seconds as part of the current time displayed in the taskbar?

A. The taskbar displays only the hours and minutes for the current time. This behavior dates back to the days of Windows 95, when displaying the seconds was deemed to be too CPU intensive. You can't use Windows to display seconds, but you can use one of several third-party utilities, such as Tclock2, which adds the date and seconds and is fully configurable.

Q. Why does the Windows 2000 Disk Cleanup utility freeze when I start it?

A. The Disk Cleanup utility frees up space on a volume. To access the utility, open My Computer, right-click the drive you want to work on, click Properties, then select Disk Cleanup from the General tab. If the program hangs the system, the problem is most likely caused by the Disk Cleanup Wizard checking for all files older than 50 days that it can compress. Disabling this behavior might improve the performance. To disable the behavior, perform the following steps:

Alternatively, you can paste the following text in a file named nodiskchkcompress.reg and double-click the filename to run it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerVolumeCachesCompress old files]

To enable the compressible-file check, you can run the .REG file you created in Step 4. If you didn't save the file in Step 4, you can paste the following text into a file to recreate the original .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerVolumeCachesCompress old files]@="{B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678}""Priority"=dword:0000012c"StateFlags"=dword:00000000

Q. When I ran disk defragmentation on a volume containing Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshots, some of my old VSS snapshots were lost. Can I restore them?

A. The VSS snapshot (aka Shadow Copy) creation process copies 16KB blocks as it writes the data to the Shadow Copy storage area (this process is independent of the file system's cluster size). You might encounter a problem if the file system's cluster size is less than 16KB, which can confuse the VSS creation process into not being able to tell the difference between disk defragmentation I/O and normal write I/O. As a result, the VSS creation process performs a copy operation that causes the Shadow Copy storage area to grow very quickly. After the VSS creation process reaches the user-defined limit set for the Shadow Copy storage area, the oldest Shadow Copies will be lost. To resolve this problem, reformat the volumes and use a cluster size of 16KB or larger.

3. Announcements
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