by John Jones
Many people want to make the most of their hardware, especially if it means you don’t have to buy a new machine in this economy. Here are 10 simple tips on how to make your Windows XP computer run faster without having to purchase additional hardware.
1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data - One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. When files are fragmented, the computer must search the hard disk when the file is opened to piece it back together. To speed up the response time, you should monthly run Disk Defragmenter, a Windows utility that defrags and consolidates fragmented files for quicker computer response.
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.
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. But if you know where your files are, you can disable this system service. It won’t do any harm to you machine, whether you search often or not very often.
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 512MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size.
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.
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.
Hope you find these 10 tips useful. Have a nice day!
Tags: college, education, self help