After you get all the hardware and peripherals on your system set up and ready to go, you should be set, right? That might be true if your PC is a desktop model, but if you have a laptop that you use both at work and at home, you're faced with a new problem. You can configure your laptop for all the peripherals you use at work, but what do you do when you bring the computer home? Now you have to hook it up to a completely different set of peripherals, which can be a royal pain to reconfigure. Fortunately for laptop users, Windows XP lets you create multiple hardware profiles for your PC, each with a different configuration, for the changing equipment you use. A laptop used with and without a docking bay is a prime system for creating additional profiles one profile for docked operation, and a second for undocked mode. I'll level with you. Hardware profiles are notoriously difficult to use. So difficult that few people use them. (I know I don't!) The reality is that Windows XP does a pretty good job recognizing what's hooked up and what's not, so that you really don't need to create separate profiles for different locations. Still, if you want to play around with profiles, be my guest. Read on and I'll tell you how. Creating New Hardware ProfilesYou create a new profile by copying and renaming an existing profile. When a hardware profile is highlighted and copied, its exact configuration is assumed by the new copy. All you have to do is assign a new name to reflect the new configuration. Here's how you create a new hardware profile:
Configuring Hardware ProfilesAfter you've created a new profile, you can configure it by selecting which devices are used by that profile. Here's how to do it:
You can also configure some general settings for each of your hardware profiles.
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