Keep your activation status intact when reinstalling XP

From a TechRepublic News Letter:

Have you ever wanted to reformat the hard disk and reinstall Windows XP on a system but you didn't want to mess around with Microsoft's Product Activation after the reinstall? Fortunately, you don't have to.
As long as you aren't making any hardware alterations, you can back up the activation status files before you reformat the hard drive and then restore them after you reinstall the operating system.

To perform the backup, follow these steps:

1. Use Windows Explorer to open the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
2. Copy the Wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak files to a floppy disk or CD.

To perform the restore, follow these steps:

1. Decline the activation request at the end of the installation procedure, and restart Windows XP.
2. During bootup, press [F8] to access the Windows Advanced Options menu.
3. Choose the Safe Mode (SAFEBOOT_OPTION=Minimal) option.
4. Use Windows Explorer to open the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
5. If they exist, rename the new Wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak files to Wpadbl.new and Wpabak.new.
6. Copy the original Wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak files from the floppy disk or CD to the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
7. Restart the system.

Edit: I'm getting conflicting info here . . . . this article (http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php) states that this procedure will NOT work after a format and reinstall.

VolumeID utility to allow you to change the volume ID of hard drives: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml#volumeid

Download more than two things at a time in Internet Explorer

From a Steve Bass article in the June 2004 PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,115606,pg,4,00.asp

(Edited)
To increase the number of IE download streams in Windows XP, add a couple of registry entries under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.

1. Back up the key before you proceed!
2. Choose Edit, New, DWORD Value
3. Type MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server=Dword:0000000a, and press Enter.
4. Right-click the new entry, choose Modify, check the Decimal radio button, enter 10 under 'Value data', and click OK.
5. Repeat these steps to create a DWORD Value in the same key named MaxConnectionsPerServer=Dword:0000000a with the same settings as the first one you created
6. Close the Registry.

First Post! (aka what am I doing here?)

Well, this is the first posting to my shiny new blog.

The blog is intended to become a personal knowledge base for IT problems and solutions I come across. I often find myself staring at a familar problem and vaguely remembering that there was a solution. Hopefully, my blog will reduce the search time involved in finding the same solution subsequent times.