Windows XP Professional Fast Logon Optimization

This is been an issue at work for a long time, where due to the Fast Logon Optimization being enabled by default in XP Pro, the user was able to logon before the network connection was established and the netlogon script wasn't able to connect the network drives. While this problem was fixed by IT a while back through domain policies, I still didn't know how exactly and I just had it more recently on my stand-alone development box, that's not connected to any domain - the box was configured to autologon and run a few scripts at logon that required the network connection. As the box was booting quickly, before the network adapter was properly configured through DHCP, the scripts were failing to run.

In the end I just found that using the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) you can disable the Fast Logon optimization by setting the following policy setting:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon\ Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon = Enabled

How to re-enable hibernation in Windows Vista

Just had this problem the other day, where not having enough space on the Vista partition to install the latest updates (.Net Framework 3.5), the Disk Cleanup wizard started and I agreed to remove the hibernation file to save some time and not having to do this again, remaining to remove some unused applications later on when the update was finished. That gave back 1.2 GB disk space and after that I managed to uninstall some more applications and compressed a few unused folders. Having enough space now and I assumed that Windows will re-create the hibernation on restart.

Well, it didn't - one reboot after, it couldn't hibernate anymore. Apparently according to Microsoft KB 920730 if the hiberfil.sys is not present Vista won't hibernate anymore.

Good news is that you can re-enable hibernation using powercfg command in Administrator mode:

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

Font smoothing in Remote Desktop to Windows XP

After looking for quite some time for a solution, I just found this post the other day on Jason Young's blog at http://www.ytechie.com/, explaining how to enable font smoothing on XP Remote Desktop server.

Consolas font was looking very jaggedy when connecting through Remote Desktop to my XP development box (btw, as an alternative I can recommend Lucida Sans Typewriter ;-), although I've tried both Standard and ClearType font smoothing settings, they were completely ignored.

This registry fix will enable font smoothing through Remote Desktop (remember you need XP SP3!!!), and the good news that Consolas still looks great in Standard mode, you don't need to enable ClearType for the entire session, unless of course you like it better that way.

Select the three lines below yourself, save them into a .reg file and then open (run) the file on the XP "server" machine, or download and open from here. Reboot the XP machine when finished and set the font smoothing per your liking.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations]
"AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001