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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Speed up slow PC - Squeeze every last drop of performance out of your XP With faster machines cropping up almost daily, the life span of a midrange PC is a little more than two years of service. Physically, the computer you bought a few years ago is just as sound as any new piece of hardware. Ideally, it could probably last you a decade or twoas long as you didnt add any new software or surf the Net. Realistically, thats not likely to be the case. Instead of buying a new computer, optimize your present one. The following are 11 things that Chip Manufacturers and PC Retailers dont want you to know or how to perform. Following these advices will drastically increase your PC performance and help you regain your sanity while saving loads of money. And, if your PC is years old and cant afford to upgrade yet, you will be able to squeeze out some more juice out of the old thing! 1. Disable file indexing. 2. Zap the Windows Prefetch folder every week. Windows XP can prefetch portions of data and applications that are frequently loaded. This allows processes appear to start faster when requested the user. Over time, the prefetch folder overwhelms with references to files and applications no longer in use. Guess what happens? Windows XP wastes time and grinds to a halt by pre-loading obsolete data. It helps you gain some performance on your XP Professional to periodically empty the prefetch folder. The prefetch folder resides on your local hard disk, under the Windows folder. %systemroot%prefetch -or- X:windowsprefetch Where X is the drive letter where you have Windows installed. Either path will get you to your local system. The second path is for those who have the default installation on the most commonly used drive letter, C: 3. Optimise Display Settings. Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. Kill unnecessary animations, and nix active desktop. Heres how to do it: 1) Go to Start 2) Click Settings 3) Click Control Panel 4) Click System 5) Click Advanced tab 6) In the Performance tab click Settings 7) Leave only the following ticked: (1) Show shadows under menus (2) Show shadows under mouse pointer (3) Show translucent selection rectangle (4) Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop (5) Use visual styles on windows and buttons Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the stability of the computer - only its responsiveness. 4. Remove the Desktop Picture 1) Right click on Desktop and select Properties 2) Select the Desktop tab 3) In the Background window select None 4) Click Ok 5. Remove Fonts for Speed 1) Open Control Panel 2) Open Fonts folder 3) Move fonts you dont need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain. 6. Speedup Folder Browsing You may have noticed that everytime you open my computer to browse folders that there is a slight 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 significantly: 1) Open My Computer 2) Click on Tools menu 3) Click on Folder Options 4) Click on the View tab. 5) Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box 6) Click Apply 7) Click Ok Reboot your computer To prevent a single Windows Explorer window tanking up takes the rest of your OS down, you can launch separate folder windows in multi processes. Open My Computer, hit on Tools, then Folder Options. Click on the View tab. Scroll down to Launch folder windows in a separate process, and enable this option. 7. Disable Performance Counters 1) download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List 2) Then select each counter in turn in the Extensible performance counters window and clear the performance counters enabled checkbox at the bottom button below 8. Optimise Your Pagefile 1) Right click on My Computer and select Properties 2) Select the Advanced tab 3) Under Performance choose the Settings button 4) Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change 5) Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file. 9. Improve Memory Usage Once Installed: 1) Click the Tools from the left menu 2) Select Memory Booster in the tools list. A new window named PC Turbo Memory will popup. 3) Click Defragment button in the new window. 4) Exit the program. Thats all. 10. Disable unnecessary services * Alerter * Background Intelligent Transfer Service * ClipBook * Computer Browser * Error Reporting Service * Help and Support * Indexing Service * IPSEC Services * Messenger * NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing * Network DDE * Network DDE DSDM * Performance Logs and Alerts * Portable Media Serial Number * QOS RSVP * Help Session Manager * Remote Registry * Secondary Logon * Server * Smart Card * Smart Card Helper * SSDP Discovery Service * System restore Service * TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper * Uninterruptible Power Supply * Universal Plug and Play Device Host * WebClient * Windows time * Wireless Zero Configuration * WMI Performance Adapter 11. Disconnect USB devices you arent using. The above steps should help increase the performance of Windows XP as well as keep it running with more stability. About the Author Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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