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The tips & Tricks section of the site are articles ranging from how to squeeze more performance out of Windows XP to how to customize Windows to make it work the way you want to work. I'll also cover some ways you can turn your home PCs into a usable network to share files, music and other media across your whole house without buying any expensive equipment or software.

Speed up Windows XP

Windows XP is a fast operating system especially when compared to the likes of Vista. However, over time it can become bogged down with old programs and files that drag its once speedy performance down to a crawl. In the is article I'll show you how to disable unnecessary services, clean up your hard drive and removing unnecessary programs to return the performance of your PC to its original state. Read more here.

Microsoft Security Essentials (add an exception for network shares)

Microsoft Security Essentials is a great free anti virus program with a small resource footprint and simple to use interface. However, I recently discovered an issue with high CPU cycles when I connected to a particular folder across my network that contained a large number of executable files. Further investigation revealed that it was MSE using hogging the CPU. I played around turning the Realtime Protection on and off and, with it off, the problem ceased. Now I knew what it was I thought it would be a simple task to simply add an exception for this network location to stop MSE scanning it. However, it seems that MSE doesn't allow you to add network locations in the exceptions section.

After some playing around I finally found a way to resolve the problem with a simple registry hack. Here it is:-

Using Regedit navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Exclusions\Paths

If the key doesn't exist I suggest you go to the Excluded Files and Locations section on the Settings tab of MSE first and add an exception for any local folder. This will create the relevant registry keys.

Once the Paths key exists simply add a new DWord value as follows:-

1. Right click and select New DWord value
2. Make the name of the DWord the share you want to exclude in the format \\servername\sharename. When you view the MSE Excluded Files and Locations section again you'll see the entry you just added.
   

Note: You may have to change the permissions on the Paths key by taking ownership of of it on the Advanced tab and give Write permissions to yourself.