Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into your house, and say “Hello, house, it’s me, <insert your name here>,” and all of the home’s hardware settings, such as the temperature of the heat and air, the dimness or brightness of the lights, and the slant of the window shades would position themselves automatically to your set preferences? What if you could also tell your home to turn on the TV and put it on a specific channel? Well, that day is almost here for our homes, but it’s already here for our Windows XP PCs. It’s easy to configure too, you just need to create a hardware profile.
Tip: You can have multiple hardware profiles.
Default Hardware Profiles
When you installed or purchased your PC, it came with one profile, named creatively enough, Profile 1. This profile tells Windows XP to start all of your installed devices and their drivers when the PC boots. This includes printers, scanners, Web cams, microphones, monitors, external drives, external DVD or CD players, keyboards and mice, and anything else that you’ve physically connected.
You can easily create a hardware profile so that when you boot it up, Windows automatically uses what you’ve configured as personal hardware settings, and enables or disables the hardware you do and don’t want to use. While creating these profiles makes the configuration of the PC as perfect as possible for your needs, it also allows the PC to perform better. Remember, the PC only needs to do what you need it to do; if it does more than necessary, you’re losing performance you could otherwise have.
Note: A laptop comes with two hardware profiles: Docked and Undocked. The default settings for these will depend on the hardware you configure for both states. There’ll be a section on laptops later.
Creating different hardware configurations can be quite useful too. You can have different hardware profiles for each user who accesses the PC, or, for different jobs performed by a single person at the PC. For instance, a teenager could create a gaming profile, while you could create a working one. The gaming profile could have advanced hardware devices configured such as handheld gaming hardware, while the working profile could have these disabled. The gaming profile could also have RAM configured differently than the working profile, and you could disable printers, scanners, and other unnecessary hardware. Remember, the more resources your PC has available, the better it will perform, and this is especially true for gamers.
Tip: Of course, you’ll set your preferred screen resolution, hardware settings, mouse and keyboard settings, and other preferences too, all of which will either be part of the hardware profile or your user account preferences. Whatever the case, they’ll be available (or not available) at boot up.
Next: Windows XP: Hardware Profiles (Part II of III)
