Ten Tips To Speed Up Windows XP
By John JonesThe economy sucks immoral trying to save money wherever we can especially on less than necessary purchases such as new computers. there just isn’t enough money to go around. And so here’s a money saving tips to keep your old computer from needing to be replaced as quickly.
1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data – One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. Disk fragmentation really can slow down your computer. Just go to accessories and find a dusty fragments are and let that run. It might take all afternoon, but it should speed up your machine. There are also several paid apps available as well.
2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors – Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors can severly hurt disk performance. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It will meticulously search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for better performance. The performance boost might not be especially large but if nothing else, this is good preventative maintenance to keep an eye on whether or not your hardware is still in good shape
3. Disable Indexing Services – Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. It’s very annoying. It also doesn’t work as well as Google Desktop for searching your files. Disable it fast and speed up your machine.
4. Optimize Display Settings – Windows XP is a looker. But it costs you system resources that are used to display all the visual items and effects. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave only a few necessary bells and whistles.
5. Speedup Folder Browsing – You may have noticed that everytime you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing speed, you can disable the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” option.
6. Disable Performance Counters – Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. Unless you are a performance fanatic, this is not very useful. Disable it.
7. Optimize Your Pagefile – You can optimize your pagefile. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile. Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have more than 1GB of memory, you probably can set the page file at 512MB or 1GB and that is more than enough.
8. Remove Fonts for Speed – Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require. Unless you are a gfx designer, you shouldn’t need 1,000 fonts. Arial, Verdana, and the rest of the built-in fonts are more than enough to suit most users.
9. Use a Flash Memory to Boost Performance – To improve performance, you need to install additional RAM memory. It’ll let you boot your OS much quicker and run many applications and access data quicker. There is no easiest and more technically elegant way to do it than use eBoostr. eBoostr is a little program that lets you improve a performance of any computer, powered by Windows XP in much the same way as Vista’s ReadyBoost. With eBoostr, if you have a flash drive, such as a USB flash thumb drive or an SD card, you can use it to make your computer run better. Simply plug in a flash drive through a USB socket and Windows XP will use eBoostr to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.
10. Perform a Boot Defrag – There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boaot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster. On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, if not, enable it. This simple step can really make a difference in boot times.
These are just a few ways that you can improve your system’s performance. Also keep in mind that system performance is equally affected by all the software you have running on your machine. If you’re running a lot of programs that once, you might just need to buy more RAM or possibly upgrade to newer hardware. With Windows 7 just around the corner. It might be time to start thinking about upgrading.
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