10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Your Windows XP
Welcome back!
Most users of Windows will agree that, while Windows XP runs quickly when it’s just been installed, it tends to get more and more sluggish as time goes by. There are many people who are of the opinion that Windows should be wiped (no pun intended) and re-installed from scratch every six months or so.
Here are a few simple tasks that can help get your Windows XP machine running like it used to without having to completely reinstall it from scratch.
1. Access Your Data Faster By Running Disk Defrag
One of the biggest factors slowing the performance of your computer is fragmentation. Files become fragmented when they are updated. The new file is written to a blank spot on the disk then the old file is deleted. The next time a file is written to the disk, this newly-created free space is used first. If it isn’t large enough, Windows will allocate another section of disk space to hold the rest of the file. Now you have a file broken into two “fragments” which are not necessarily physically located anywhere near each other on the disk. This means that every time the file is opened the system has to go all over the hard drive gathering fragments to piece back together.
To speed up the response time, you should run Disk Defragmenter every month or so. Disk Defragmenter finds these file fragments and arranges them on your disk so they’re in as few pieces as possible so as to reduce the time needed to find all the parts of a file.
* Follow Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter then select the drives you want to defrag and click Analyze
* Click Defragment
If another application writes on the drive during this process, Windows will start the Defragmentation process all over, so it’s best to do this at a time when you aren’t going to be using the machine for anything else. Depending on the size of your hard drive, you’ll probably want to go get a cup of coffee, watch a movie, or raise a family while you wait. For large drives that are really full, this can take a LONG time, but it’s time well spent.
2. “Search And Destroy” Disk Errors
As time goes by, your hard disk will probably develop bad sectors. These bad sectors can slow down hard disk performance and occasionally cause data loss. Windows’ Error Checking utility is designed to find and repair bad sectors . It searches your hard drive for bad sectors and read errors then repairs them resulting in faster performance.
* Follow Start > My Computer
* In My Computer right-click the drive you want to scan and click Properties
* Click the Tools tab
* Click Check Now
* Select the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” check box
* Click Start
3. Turn Off Indexing Services To Boost Performance
“Indexing Services” is a little application that maintains lists of all the files on the computer. It uses these lists, or indexes, to increase the speed of searches. If you don’t use the “Find Files” function very often, you can disable this system service without doing any harm to you machine.
* Click Start->Settings->Control Panel
* Double-click Add/Remove Programs
* Click the Add/Remove Window Components
* Uncheck the Indexing services
* Click Next
4. Trim The Fat Out Of Your Display Settings
Windows XP is loaded with eye candy that costs you in terms of system resources - particularly CPU cycles that could be better used elsewhere. Windows actually looks just fine if you disable most of the settings.
* Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel
* Click System
* Click the “Advanced” tab
* In the “Performance” tab click “Settings”
* Leave only the following ticked:
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. Speed up Folder Browsing
Have you ever noticed that everytime you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay before you can do anything? This little annoyance is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers every time you open Explorer. Fixing this will improve response time from Explorer. All you have to do is disable the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” option.
* Open My Computer
* Click on Tools menu
* Click on Folder Options
* Click on the View tab.
* Uncheck the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” check box
* Click Apply
* Click Ok
* Reboot your computer
6. Performance Counters Decrease Performance
There is a theory in Quantum Physics that the act of measuring a given characteristic will change that characteristic. I don’t remember if it’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or if it was Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. In either case, that theory applies to Computer Performance. Measuring it causes it to change.
Windows XP has this performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. This is great in theory, but monitoring CPU performance uses extra CPU cycles and, therefore, degrades CPU performance. It’s generally a good idea to disable these monitors.
* Download and install the “Extensible Performance Counter List” from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7ff99683-b7ec-4da6-92ab-793193604ba4&displaylang=en
* select each counter listed in the “Extensible performance counters” window and clear the “performance counters enabled” checkbox at the bottom button.
7. Optimize Your Pagefile
Windows normally spends a lot of time spinning your hard drive and resizing it’s swap file (also known as a page file). You can set a fixed size to your pagefile and save the operating system need to resize the pagefile as well as saving a lot of wear and tear on your hard disk.
* 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
* Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file.
A good rule of thumb I read somewhere is to pick a number equal to the amount of RAM installed times 1.5. So, if your laptop has 256MB of RAM, you’d set these both to 384MB.
There is a point, however, where that rule of thumb no longer applies. If your system has more than 512MB, it’s very unlikely you’d ever need a 768MB pagefile, so just set it to match your amount of RAM.
8. Remove Fonts for Speed
While it can make you feel really awesome to have a zillion fonts installed, the truth is that fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a few system resources. For optimal performance, you’d be better off trimming your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require. Keep the fancy “Star Trek” fonts and stuff on a CD and just install them when you actually need them, then remove them when you’re done with them.
* Open Control Panel
* Open Fonts folder
* Move fonts you don’t need to a temporary directory (something like 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.
9. Increase Performance with Flash Memory
There’s no nice way to say it: Windows is a memory pig. The more RAM you can give it, the happier Windows will be.
What do you do if your motherboard is already sporting all the RAM it can hold? There can’t be a simpler solution than eBootsr.
With eBoostr installed, you just plug a USB flash drive into a USB 2.0 port and Windows will use it and some free RAM as an extra layer of performance-boosting cache for your PC. No need to open up your PC or laptop. No need to sort through all the different types of RAM on the market to be sure you’ve got the right one. Just plug in a $10 jump drive and you’re done.
This works best for frequently used programs and data such as office programs, graphics applications or developer tools. It is a real boon for laptop owners because a laptop upgrade is usually more complicated and laptop hard drives are by definition slower than those of desktops.
10. Perform a Boot Defragment
There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: a boot defragment will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are physically closer to one another on the hard drive, your system will start faster.
Boot defragment is usually should be enabled by default. Sometimes, however, if things have gone a little haywire or you’ve had someone else “tweaking” your omputer, it might not be on yours. To ensure 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 if it is not already set to Y.
* Exit the Registry
* Reboot
There you have it - ten tips that will have your PC running like a high-performance sportscar.
Disclaimer: I have not personally tried each and every one of these suggestions because these days my computer runs Kubuntu Linux more often than it runs any flavor of Windows. I make no claims as to the accuracy of what’s written here and am in no way responsible for what may or may not happen to your computer hardware and/or software and/or data in the event you elect to follow any or all of these suggestions. Proceed at your own risk.
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