Emergency Boot Discs are something everyone should take seriously.

• How do I prepare an emergency boot disc so I’m ready in case Windows becomes unbootable?

Alas, the days when Windows came with a program for creating a useful emergency boot floppy are long gone. And those old boot floppies wouldn’t help with XP or Vista–even if you PC had a floppy drive.

Boot from one of the discs that came with your PC, and examine the menus (don’t select anything that might wipe your drive). You’re looking for emergency utilities. You’re in real luck if you have a full Windows XP CD or Vista DVD. These come with great tools for diagnosing and repairing an unbootable PC. In fact, if you don’t have a real Windows disc, find one you can borrow in an emergency. Don’t install Windows from a borrowed disc, but if it has the same version of Windows as your PC, use its repair tools.

Boot from an XP CD, and press R at the ‘Welcome to Setup’ screen to see the Recovery Console, a DOS-like command-line environment with a number of useful utilities. Consult “What to Do When XP or 2000 Won’t Boot” for additional details. If you boot

1) Tune XP’s Visual Performance
Depending on how you set it up, XP may have reserved a substantial amount of your CPU horsepower for things like animating various desktop elements, placing shadows under menus and cursors, and rounding the upper corners of open windows. In the aggregate, these visual effects can slow down screen-drawing operations significantly. Also, XP may have selected a “color depth” for your video system in excess of what you really need; this, too, can slow down screen operations.

To adjust the color depth, right click anywhere on an empty portion of your desktop and select Properties/Settings. For most normal business users, the Color Quality setting should be set to Medium (16 bit). Higher settings do matter in photo/video editing and similar applications, but for mundane things like Web browsing, E-mail, and word processing, the Medium setting is fully adequate, and it’s faster.

To adjust XP’s desktop animations and visual effects, right click on My Computer and select Properties/Advanced/Performance Settings. You can choose to activate/deactivate individual items or use the general “best performance/best appearance” buttons. When you’ve made a change, click Apply, and you’ll see the effects almost immediately. (By the way: Selecting Best Performance makes your desktop