PCStats have a new advanced guide out for flashing your video card BIOS! While this *not* something for the novice to undertake, flashing your video card BIOS may lead to performance and feature enhancements.

We recently ran an article on flashing (reprogramming) the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) of your motherboard to enable new features and fix errors. That got us thinking that we'd only covered half the story. Sure, hardware enthusiasts have been upgrading the BIOS on their motherboards for years, but what about the other components of a computer system?

Here's a snap:

Video cards in particular have an interesting history in relation to the BIOS flashing procedure. While motherboard BIOS fixes generally add support for new processors and fix hardware glitches, video card BIOS updates have the potential to do much more. Enterprising tech-heads have discovered instances where a video card can actually be transformed by a BIOS update, activating hidden features and potential buried performance aspects by the manufacturer (generally for marketing purposes).

Click here for the full guide:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1633

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This isnt a tweak, but a great little feature! For a great way to put your digital photos to work, try creating a slide show presentation for use as a screen saver. Here's how:

1. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and then click Properties.

2. Click the Screen Saver tab.

3. In the Screen saver list, click My Pictures Slideshow.

4. Click Settings to make any adjustments, such as how often the pictures should change, what size they should be, and whether you'll use transition effects between pictures, and then click OK.

Now your screen saver is a random display of the pictures taken from your My Pictures folder.

To disable the stupid feature in WinXP which tries to send a report to microsoft every time a program crashes you will have to do this:

*************************************************************************

Open Control Panel

Click on Preformance and Maintenance.

Click on System.

Then click on the Advanced tab

Click on the error reporting button on the bottom of the windows.

Select Disable error reporting.

Click OK

Click OK

*************************************************************************

Would you like to use the Windows Update feature without being forced to register with Microsoft? OK then, this is what you can do:

Launch good ol' Regedit.

Go down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion.

Look for a value named RegDone. If it isn't there create a new value with that name.

Right click the new value and choose Modify. Make the value 1.

XP lets you rename files in bulk by simply selecting multiple files within Windows Explorer and pressing the F2 key. When you use this feature, the OS applies the name you enter to the first file and applies the same name with a number in parentheses to the other files you selected (the file extensions remain unchanged).

For example, if you select the following files,

* notes.doc

* figures.xls

* disney.jpg

* holiday.gif

and rename the first file (notes.doc) to SoD.doc, XP renames the remaining files as follows:

Would you like to use the Windows Update feature without being forced to register with Microsoft? OK then, this is what you can do:

Launch good ol' Regedit.

Go down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion.

Look for a value named RegDone. If it isn't there create a new value with that name.

Right click the new value and choose Modify. Make the value 1.