Registry Tweaks to Enhance Your Windows XPerience - Part VII: Windows Applications

In this episode of our Windows XP tweaking saga, we’ll learn how to customize a few default applications of this operating system. If you’re just joining us, please allow me to ‘fill you in’ on the details: the "Registry Tweaks to Enhance Your Windows XPerience" series provides tweaks that do not require any IT knowledge whatsoever, that are easy and fast to apply and don’t need any third-party software to be installed on your computer. Notepad is all you need. During the process, you will create an optimization file with just the tweaks you’re interested in, that you can apply on any number of computers.

The first thing you have to do, if you’re not familiar with this series, is to read the first article. There, you’ll find the few steps that must be followed in order for the optimization process to be completed successfully (and for you to understand what must be done with the bolded lines below).

So, now that you’ve created your tweaks.reg file and wrote 'Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00' at the beginning, let’s start changing a few things under the hood of Notepad. Before making these modifications, please be sure that Notepad is not running.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad]
"LfUnderline"=dword:00000001

For some strange reason, you cannot change the font in Notepad to Underline, only Regular, Italic and Bold are available. Not anymore! Adding the above two lines to your tweaks.reg file will immediately activate this option in Microsoft’s text editor.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad]
"LfUnderline"=dword:00000000

As you might have guessed, this tweak will have the reverse effect to the one above it. So, if you wish to remove the Underline option from Notepad, just add the above two lines at the end of your tweaking file.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad]
"LfStrikeOut"=dword:00000001

I guess this tweak is pretty intuitive if you understood the previous example: use the above two lines to activate Strikeout in your Notepad. If you no longer need this option and wish to deactivate it, just replace 1 with 0, like in the Underline example, and run the optimization file again.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad]
"StatusBar"=dword:00000001

An application’s StatusBar is very important to most experienced users, as it sometimes offers useful information. Notepad’s StatusBar makes no exception. Therefore, if you wish to disable Word Wrap and activate it, just add the above two lines to your tweaks.reg file. Of course, if you wish to disable it, just follow the examples above.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences]
"DisableMRU"=dword:00000001

Enough "chit-chat" about Notepad. Let’s head on to Windows Media Player. In case you didn’t know, MRU stands for Most Recently Used. So, as you’ve probably guessed, the above two lines will disable the Media Player history. To reverse the procedure, just replace "dword:00000001" with "-" (without the quotes, of course) and run tweaks.reg again.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsMediaPlayer]
"TitleBar"="Softpedia"

This is a neat trick that will add "provided by Softpedia" to your Windows Media Player title. Naturally, you can replace Softpedia with anything you like. To remove this text, just follow the same procedure as the tweak above.

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\RecentFileList]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\RecentURLList]

The above two lines will clear Windows XP’s Media Player history. Be advised that this tweak will not disable the history (in order to accomplish that, you can only use the tweak mentioned a few lines above) and is irreversible - you will not be able to get the list back.

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Paint\Recent File List]

As in the case of Windows Media Player, the above line will clear the history of Paint. And, of course, the process is irreversible.

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\WordPad/Recent File List]

As you might have guessed, this final tweak will clear the WordPad history and also make it impossible to recover.

That’s all for today, folks. If you’re looking for other interesting Windows XP tweaks, don’t hesitate to read other articles in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 or part 6. Have fun optimizing your Windows XP operating system and feel free to post some of the tricks you often use to enhance it.