10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Your Windows Xp

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10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Your Windows Xp

1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data

One of the main factors that influence the disk performance is fragmentation. When files on your hard drive are fragmented, it takes much more time to read and edit them since the computer has to constantly look for part of these files in hundreds of different locations. To avoid this, you have to regularly run Disk defragmentation.

  • Follow Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
  • Check one disk at a time and click Defragment. Do so foe every logical drive you have.

2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors

Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing difficult or even impossible. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It'll search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for faster performance.

Over the course of time, as your PC is being used, errors and bad sectors will appear on your drives. Reading information from these sectors becomes more and more difficult, or even impossible. A Windows tool was specifically designed to take care of these, and is called the Error Checking Utility. It will run a search and attempt to fix all the problems it detects.

  • Close out of all the programs and save all your files
  • Follow Start > My Computer
  • Right-click the hard disk you want to scan and click Properties
  • Click the Tools tab and select check for errors
  • Click Check Now
  • Select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box
  • Click Start

3. Disable Indexing Services

Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. By indexing and updating lists of all the files on the computer, it helps you to do a search for something faster as it scans the index list. It is useful for those who regularly do searches on their PC, but useless for all others. It won't do any harm to your machine if you turn it off.

  • Go to Start
  • Click Settings
  • Click Control Panel
  • Double-click Add/Remove Programs
  • Click the Add/Remove Window Components
  • Uncheck the Indexing services
  • Click Next

4. Optimize Display Settings

Windows XP is a looker. Not as much as Windows Vista, of course, but far more so then the previous versions of this OS. These looks come at a price since everything and anything performed on your PC leads to a performance drop of the system overall. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave the following:

  • Show shadows under menus
  • Show shadows under mouse pointer
  • Show translucent selection rectangle
  • Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
  • Use visual styles on windows and buttons

5. Speedup Folder Browsing

Every time you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay. This happens because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers every time 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 built-in performance monitor utility which constantly monitors your PC's performance. It is of no use to most users, since they will notice the performance drop themselves or won’t notice it at all if it is tiny. These utilities take up system resources so disabling them might help you speed things up a bit.

  • Download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List
  • Then select each counter in turn in the "Extensible performance counters" window and clear the "performance counters enabled" checkbox at the bottom button below

7. Optimize Your System Pagefile

By default the pagefile size is set to automatic, which makes it possible for your system to resize it on the go but may lead to a lot of problems, like hang ups and page file fragmentation. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile.

  • Right click on My Computer and select Properties
  • Select the Advanced tab
  • Under Performance choose the Settings button
  • Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change
  • Select the drive you want to use and set a fixed size, using the same amount for minimum and max values.

A good idea is to set the page file to 1.5 the size of your RAM. Use other users to experiment, you already know where to go to fix it in case there is a need to.

8. Remove Fonts for Speed

All the different types of letters you see in your programs are changed by fonts. These may help the text look more appealing, but they do eat up a chunk of your computer resources. For optimal performance, most of these can be disabled, leaving only the necessary ones.

  • Open Control Panel
  • Open Fonts folder
  • Create a special folder somewhere for your fonts in case you ever need them again
  • Move all the rarely used fonts into that folder, leaving only the essentials in the Fonts folder.

9. Increase the amount of RAM Boost Performance

In a lot of cases simply twicking settings and services won’t do you any good is your system has desperately low RAM. Purchase and install new modules into your computer to see a major increase in loading times, starting up and performance overall.

10. Perform a Boot Defragment

If you ever get tires of how long your system loads, there is a simple way to help it: make your system do a boot defrag, which will allocate all the files next to each other on your hard drive. This way when these files are read during boot, it will take much less time to find all the ones needed.

On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. To make sure that boot defragment is enabled:

  • Run the Registry Editor
  • Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
  • Set the Enable string value to Y(or leave it as it is if it’s Y already)
  • Exit the Registry
  • Reboot

We hope that these ten steps have been helpful and you managed to get some extra power out of your personal computer.

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