Hidden surprises in Windows XP
Hidden surprises in Windows XP
Yatish Suvarna TNN
Regular office drudgery can get killing without office pranks. Here are three cheats that will help you brag about your extraordinary prowess with XP games to your colleagues, thanks to the Easter eggs hidden within them. Easter eggs simply refer to a hidden feature or tid bits of information within a software. They consist of tiny games, messages, sounds or even images and can be unlocked with simple key combinations or commands. Want to win a game of Solitaire with tapping on just three keys on your keyboard? While no one’s looking, simply jab the magic combination ‘Alt + Shift + 2’ and whoosh! All your cards will obediently go in their appropriate places. Chanting a little mumbo-jumbo as mantra will create the right effect. If it’s FreeCell that you plan to work on, then switch to using ‘Ctrl + Shift + F10’ immediately after you start the game. You’ll get a box that gives you three options: Abort, Retry or Ignore. Simply click on ‘Abort’ and move any card to win. Pinball in another fun game in Windows XP. To get extra balls type 1max at the start of a new game. Better still, to increase your ranking without even playing the game, simply type ‘rmax’ at the beginning of a new game to go up in ranks. Windows XP has a secret application that lets you create and edit fonts. To access it, go to ‘Start > Run’ and type ‘eudcedit’. This will open an application called ‘Private Character Editor’. The beta version of Microsoft Office 2007 has this interesting egg; Open Word and create a blank document. Now type =rand(200,99) anywhere and watch as 556 pages get filled with text on help about inserting tabs and lots more.
Times of India 08 Dec 2006 Bangalore
