University of Baltimore
Merrick School of Business

Mini-project 1
Treasure hunting in Windows XP

Go to the MISLAB. Log as Administrator in your group Windows XP "machine" by selecting Windows for Administration in the boot login of the machine corresponding to your group number (the username and password are adminxx, where xx is your group number). Note: do not save any files in drive C:, it may be wiped out in the periodic maintenance.

1. change the background of your desktop and setup a screensaver using 3D-text with the name of your group (do not set password protection in the screen saver) and create at least five shortcuts in your desktop (DOS console, Explorer, Control Panel, MyComputer and Notepad). Change the name of MyComputer shortcut to System.
2. open Computer Manager, Event Viewer and explain at least three of the events you see listed there (use help to find some of the answers).
3. open task manager (press control-alt-del and select task manager) and find three processes -- list their PID, name and memory used. Please also find the total physical memory, the memory in use, the virtual memory and CPU use. What memory space (virtual and physical) is the kernel using?
4. continue in task manager, add columns for virtual memory size, threads, paged and non-paged pool. Show the results and explain the relation between threads and processes. What is the avergage number of threads for all processes running in the machine?
5. open Computer Manager, Device Manager and check what brand of Monitor, Hard-drive(s), network adapter, CD-ROM/DVD may be installed in your machine.
6. open Computer Manager, Disk Management and explain how many hard-drives and partitions there are in your computer. Don't change anything.
7. open MyComputer (System if you renamed it) and check the size of the swap file and in what drive it is kept.
8. open Control Panel and find what applications are installed and when were they last used (two to three examples are enough).
9. Stop and disable the telnet, remote registry, messenger, indexing, routing and remote access, and NetMeeting remote services. Show me.
10. open Command prompt and change the font size, the window size to 40 lines, and change the background color to white and text to black. Explain and show how you can copy and paste between a command prompt window and Notepad.

Submitting the report

• Post your group project report in the Mini-project 1 entry of the Assignments folder of one of the group members in WebTycho.
• You should submit just one file per group in zip format.
• Place all your files of the project in one directory and use a free compression software from Nonags to create one file in zip format.
• You may find difficult sometimes to save some of the screens you see. If this is the case, please use a free software for screen capture you can download from Nonags.
• If you have problems capturing to your liking the reports, please use a free software from PrimoPDF to create a PDF file.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu This page was last updated on February 2, 2007. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.