Tips and Tricks

Are you tired of waiting for a specific application to close out to restart your computer? Here’s a simple registry tweak to shorten the time of a stuck application in Windows XP.

Launch the registry editor by going to START>RUN and typing in regedit and navigate through these steps:

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\CONTROL PANEL\DESKTOP then double click the AutoEndTask icon in the right side. Change the value data to 1.
2. Next double-click the HungAppTimeout icon on the same window and edit the value to XXXX milliseconds to the desire wait time of your choice. The default setting is ’5000′ or 5 seconds.
3. To reset the wait time for program that is slow to shutdown when Window exits, double-click the WaitToKillAppTimeout icon in the right registry pane change the default value (20,000 ms or 20 seconds) to the maximum wait time of your choice. Then press Enter.

You should see a lot of improvement now when you are waiting for your Application to close out.

Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk.

For some who doesn’t know it, did you know that Google is a dictionary as well? I knew that most of us here has Google as their homepage and the best way to utilize the search engine is to also use their dictionary feature. How to do it?

On the default search bar of Google, just key in “define:” without the quotes followed by your desired word. See screen shot below:

The word that I use is the longest English word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It is a factitious word alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust found in volcanoes’ but occurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word. Source wikipedia.com from google.

Oh by the way, did I mention that it is also a calculator?