Ways To Speed Up Windows XP

Ways To Speed Up Windows XP

By ghost | 5549 Reads |

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This is my first article so any critiscism is welcome!

Ok these tips are very easy to do, so im going to presume that you already know your way around Windows XP, but you can PM me if you need help with anything here.

First of all, Stop using the Welcome screen if you have more than one user. This will speed up initial boot times and i belive speed up the login process. You can do this from User Accounts, in the Control Panel.

Second, Disable unnessacary startup entries and services. This speeds up login time and free's up RAM, especially useful if you have 256mb or less of RAM or you play demanding games alot. To do this, open MSCONFIG and goto the services panel, check the box that says "hide all Micrsoft Services." You should be able to safely disable all services now showing. but you might want to leave your Anti-Virus and Firewall services running. In the startup tab you can disable everything, but again you might want to leave Anti-Virus and Firewalls alone.

Clean up the desktop. ok well this is simple, delete any shortcuts you dont use, put any files there into "My documents" and re-name any shortcuts left to simpler names like this: Windows Live Messneger, becomes Messneger or Mozillia Firefox becomes Firefox

also in display properties, disable your screensaver and wallpaper. if you desperatly need a screensaver, set the computer to turn the monitor off after a short time in Power Options instead.

Clean up the Programs menu, this can be pain staking if you have alot of programs, but the more programs you have, the more useful it is. a good way to start doing this is to delete unnessecary shortcuts. like those to Unistallers and Websites. Then group the remaning shortcuts into groups like "Games" and "Internet" Then Re-name the shortcuts like you did on the desktop.

Clean up your drive. well yeah, run Diskcleanup and Ccleaner, you should do this often anyway but i mean manually. you should backup old and unused files to CD/DVD or whatever and delete them from your HDD if they are not needed. go through your "My Recived Files" or where ever you put your downloads and clean it up. This not only means that these folders can be accessed quicker, but it means that you free up the quicker areas of your drive for more frequently used files. If you dont use help files at all, run a search for *.chm and *.hlp files and delete them all, you may also want to go through your programs and delete the files they dont use, a good example of this is in Photoshop, it keeps all the files for Activation and Registration after you have done so.

Get a better Disk Defragmenter than the default one. Diskkepper Lite is good if you dont want to pay. but any of the applications made by Diskkeper are good. Also get a good tweaking program like Tune-Up Utilities, the trial should be good enough, but you will lose its features after 30 days. you should do a Defrag twice a week, run Ccleaner everytime you log off (after shuting down all programs) and Diskcleanup and Registry Cleaner before you defragment. If you have a registry defragmenter, its not really worth running it very often, but it is worth it if you clean alot out from the registry.

NOTES: Ccleaner: http://www.ccleaner.com/ Diskeeper Lite: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207 Tune-Up Utillites: http://www.tune-up.com/ a very good XP tweaking guide: http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks1.htm

Thanks comments and ratings encouraged as awlways!