Making Windows XP More Faster - Part 1

Some of the working tweaks you can do to your Windows XP can really be a blessing to your system’s speed. So I thought about sharing with you the safe tweaks on how to have a faster Windows XP. As a disclaimer do the following tweaks at your own risk.

1. DISABLE INDEXING SERVICES Indexing Services is a small little program that uses large amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexes and updates lists of all the files that are on your computer. It does this so that when you do a search for something on your computer, it will search faster by scanning the index lists. If you don’t search your computer often, or even if you do search often, this system service is completely unnecessary. To disable do the following:
   1. Go to Start
   2. Click Settings
   3. Click Control Panel
   4. Double-click Add/Remove Programs
   5. Click the Add/Remove Window Components
   6. Uncheck the Indexing services
   7. Click Next
2. OPTIMISE DISPLAY SETTINGS Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. To optimise:
   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:
      • 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
3. 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
   8. Reboot your computer
4. IMPROVE MEMORY USAGE Cacheman Improves the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings. NOTE: This program is shareware and some features require activation. Once Installed:
   1. Go to Show Wizard and select All
   2. Run all the wizards by selecting Next or Finished until you are back to the main menu. Use the defaults unless you know exactly what you are doing.
   3. Exit and Save Cacheman
   4. Restart Windows
5. OPTIMISE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest is to run TCP/IP Optimizer.
   1. Download and install
   2. Click the General Settings tab and select your Connection Speed (Kbps)
   3. Click Network Adapter and choose the interface you use to connect to the Internet
   4. Check Optimal Settings then Apply
   5. Reboot
6. OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE If you give your pagefile a fixed size it saves the operating system from needing to resize the page file.
   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.
   Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. While this is good for systems with smaller amounts of memory (under 512MB) it is unlikely that a typical XP desktop system will ever need 1.5 X 512MB or more of virtual memory. 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.

Next articles :
Making Windows XP More Faster - Part 2