Many of us don’t know that there are other fun ways to do in Windows XP besides being the most reliable OS for now. If you are fond of discovering things and would like to see beyond what’s being presented to you, “hacking” tips would probably excite you. Great inventions come from curious minds that are never satisfied discovering things beyond what is presented within face value.

Here are some “hacking” tips to make your windows experience a little bit exciting, remember that you need a basic understanding of Windows registry first in order to follow the instructions accurately, if not, well it’s time for you to learn now.  One important notice though, whenever you make changes in the Windows registry refreshing it a number of times would enable the changes to take effect. You can do it by simply pressing the F5 button. If that doesn’t work restart your computer.

How to Exit Windows in a Quick and Cool Way

Shutting down your computer sometimes would take a lot of time and process, there are at least 3 to 4 order of procedures before you finally shuts down your system by clicking and pointing your cursor in the process. With this simple step of creating a shortcut on your desktop, you can immediately shut down your computer with single click. Here’s how to do it:

Start by creating a new shortcut on your desktop. Right click on your desktop panel>select New>Shortcut. A command line box should appear (see figure 1.0)

Figure 1.0

In the command line box, type: C:\windows\rundll.exeuser.exe,exitwindowsexec

This will restart your windows immediately, however, to create a shortcut to restarting Windows, you should type this in the command line box:   c:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows

The shortcut created in your desktop will shut down without any warning if clicked. You can change the Icon of your shutdown shortcut to make it look cool by simply right clicking the icon>properties>customize>change icon.

I rename my icon “do not click” as some other users is sure is curious to a “do not touch” warning, and the more you prevented them from touching something the more they will do it. It is indeed priceless to see the look in their faces if they “accidentally” clicked the shut down button on your desktop.

Prevent Shutdown

This is a cool trick to play on shared computers. This “hacking” trick will prevent shutdown on your computer and will send a user baffled on the “unusual” computer behavior while you are laughing your asses out. This involves editing the registry that is why it is advisable to create a back up first.

Launch regedit.exe and go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Look for a NoClosekey on the right pane. If you can’t find it, create it by right clicking the right pane, select New>string value>(name it as NoCloseKey). Now that you have the NoCloseKey on the right pane, right click it and select modify and input 1 in the value data box.

This will disable the shut down on your computer with the following warning:

“This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”

You can enable again the shutdown by changing the value of NoClosekey to 0. Or better yet delete the NoCloseKey entry you have created.