A program hangs and stops responding, and you open up the Task Manager and click End Program (sometimes several times before the uncooperative program finally shuts down). Why not just have Windows close programs that quit responding so you won't have to? You can do it with a registry tweak. As usual, we recommend that you back up the registry before making any changes. Here are the steps:
In your favorite registry editor, navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
in the right pane, right click the entry AutoEndTasks.
Select Modify.
In the Value Data field, change the value to 1.
Click OK, and close the registry editor.

Need to format your hard drive and reinstall XP, and don't want to have to go through the product activation process again? You can save the activation status info and then restore it after you reinstall the operating system, as long as you haven't made any changes to the hardware. Here's how:
Before reformatting, in My Computer, double click the drive letter on which you installed XP, and navigate to WINDOWS\System32.
Click "Show the contents of this folder" if necessary.
Copy the following files to a floppy, USB drive, CD/DVD or network location: wpa.dbl and wpa.bak.
After reformatting and reinstalling XP, select NO when asked if you want to activate Windows now.
Restart in Safe Mode.
In My Computer, open the WINDOWS\System32 folder and rename the existing wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files (if you have them).
Now copy your old wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files to the System32 folder.
Restart and you should not be requested to activate again. This only works when you reinstall Windows on the same computer and the hardware remains the same.

IE limits you to two download sessions in order to comply with RFC 2068, an Internet standard. You can also have one queued download. This standard originally made sense because spreading the bandwidth between multiple downloads would cause them all to be very slow. However, these days many folks have access to ultra high speed Internet connections via cable and fiber optic, up to 10, 20 or 30 Mbps. That means it's now feasible to have many downloads going at the same time. You can edit the registry to change the limit. Here's how to set IE to allow ten download sessions:
Open the Registry editor and navigate tot eh following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
Click Edit and select New, then click DWORD Value.
Name the new value MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server.
Double click it and give it a value of 10 (Decimal).
Click Edit | New again and click DWORD Value.
Name the second new value MaxConnectionsPerServer.
Double click it and give it, too, a value of 10 (Decimal).
Close the registry editor.