You need to re-install Windows and want to skip the nice new feature called "activation procedure", which M$ forces after each installation? In this case, before you start with the new installation, make a copy of the files wpa.dll and wpa.bac you find in your \Windows\System32 directory. After the new installation, just place them at this location again.

This should work as long as you did not replace more than 2 hardware components after the initial activation.

We don't want to send our system information to M$ - do we? So we disable this by telling Windows it's all done. Start the registry editor and set the value of the key "RegDone" to "1": \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Current Version

If we want to use a printer located on a CUPS server, we need some preparations. If the servers name is not resolvable via DNS, we first need to solve this by adding a line to the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS file specifying the server name and its IP address, like this:

192.168.0.1 minerva

(in this example, the servers name is minerva, and its IP address is 192.168.0.1). This is to work around in a bug with Windows XP (and 2000), causing the printer configuration not to be able using a plain IP address - which normally should work as well.

No we can add the printer: Click on the "Start" button, then "Settings", and select "Printer". A new window opens. In there, click on "add a new printer". Enable the URL field, and enter the printers location. In our example, we have a printer named hp_officejet, so it would look like

http://minerva:631/printers/hp_officejet

Then click the "Continue" button. You may be asked for the printer driver - but everything that follows now, is just the normal procedure when adding a printer in Windows.

If an error occurs, and a popup box informs you about inavailability of the printer, you may first want to try opening the above mentioned URL in your browser. If this leads to an error, too, we have to distinguish whether it is the network or the CUPS server. Open a command line ("Start", "Execute" and enter cmd in the box), and try to find minerva by entering ping minerva in the command box. If the result is that minerva could not be found, you have a network problem. Otherwise, you may need some changes on the CUPS setup - find more about this on the Linux page. Hopefully there should be a section about CUPS, too.

The Micro$oft Internet Explorer always refuses to open .txt files with the program you associated with this extension - no matter what? This is due to the fact that this program behaves different than any other browser, when it comes to content interpretation. The IE simply ignores the extension of that file. Instead, it checks for the content type belonging to it. In our case, this is text/plain - and the IE claims this for itself.

So what to do? The reason is to be found in the registry, and we find it behind the key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\Content Type]. Just drop this key from the registry, and IE won't find out about that anymore. So, finally, also .txt files open with the associated program as expected.