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Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 2

Post author:ITechNTips
Post published:May 25, 2014
Post category:Tutorial Windows
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Read Part 1 — Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1

Continued from above link —

6. Disable Performance Counters

Microsoft windows has some inbuilt performance monitoring tools installed which monitors and provide reports about Performance of system through registry. These utilities consumes a lot of system resources. You can safely disable them if you are a home user, as most of these performance logs are used by It engineers maintaining large corporate networks. To do same you need to install a small utility provided by Microsoft itself.

Download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List from – http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/exctrlst/1.00.0.1/nt5/en-us/exctrlst_setup.exe

Then select each counter in turn in the ‘Extensible performance counters’ window and clear the ‘performance counters enabled’ checkbox at the bottom button below

resource-kit This will surely release a significant portion of system resources hence giving you a better performance.

7. Optimize Your Pagefile

Windows uses a pagefile for it’s virtual memory needs. This virtual memory is used as extra ram when needed. if you have 512MB or more memory you can safely fix the amount of Virtual memory, this will protect OS from changing size of Pagefile and most of time will result in better performance unless you running some application which requires a very large amount of Memory.

Right click on My Computer, select Properties and then Select the Advanced tab.

Under Performance Click on the Settings button.

Again select the Advanced tab and for Virtual Memory select Change.

Choose the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file, and set it size equal to your ram size.

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Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1

Post author:ITechNTips
Post published:May 25, 2014
Post category:Tutorial Windows
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Well you have a quite Old Windows XP system and you worried about the speed of your system. It seems that your computer is getting Slow day by day.. Now you are tired of slow speed and thinking to upgrade just because your PC is running slow compared to what it was when you bought it new. But before deciding to upgrade the hardware try following things and it may restore the speed of your good old PC to it’s original state and you will not need to spend your hard earned money in upgrading the PC.

1. Defragment Your disk

The first thing which slow down the Computer is Disk Fragmentation. Files get fragmented as computer deletes and adds new files and Hard disk takes more time in searching and displaying fragmented files then files located in adjacent places. To speed up file search time you need to defrag your hard disk. You should run your defragmenter at least once a month the best option is to schedule the defragmentation task for a convenient time so that you don’t have to worry about it. even though if you are not comfortable with scheduled task then here is the process to do it manually —

Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.

Select the drives you want to defrag (important is OS drive or usually C:) and click on Button named Analyze.

Once analysis is complete Click defrag.

Click Defragment

Defragmentation process is quite time taking and can run for hours depending on how much fragments your hard disk have. Also even though Windows defragmenter is good enough but for more optimum performance we recommend using some third party software like O&O Disk Defragmenter.

2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors

Over the time because of intensive disk operation, and improper shut downs disk may develop some structure error or Bad sectors. These kind of error occupy disk space or report improper disk usage to OS and can lead to slow performance. Sometime it even refuse to write data. To repair such error Windows has a build in tool called Check disk or Disk checker. It searches entire hard disk for several commonly known problems and rectify the or mark the bad sector as well. If possible it also recovers data from Bad sector and relocates that to other position of Hard disk. To run Disk Checker follow the steps given below –

Click Start > Select My Computer.

From My Computer right-click on the hard disk drive you want to scan and select Properties.

Choose the Tools tab

Click on the button Check Now

Select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box and click Start.

This will now automatically check the hard disk and repair it wherever possible. also if it finds any error which can;t be repaired bu tool it will inform you and will save the same in an error log which you can use for later use.

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Print File List by Right Clicking on Folder

Post author:ITechNTips
Post published:April 27, 2014
Post category:Tips n Tricks Tutorial
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Have you ever tried printing the content of a directory or file list you have stored in directory? It seems impossible as there is no inbuilt feature of doing that…

Next question is why you want to print directory listing ? Well you might be having lots of MP3 stored there and you want to upload the list to internet so that your friend can ask what they need. Or you might want to have a hard copy of your files stored in the directory and most commonly used reason is you want to create a CD label with list of files stored in it…

Ok So now there are 2-3 different method to do same, we will discuss all of them here..

Method -1 – Printing form DOS Command prompt-

To print using dos command prompt please follow these steps —

Start a command prompt (run -> CMD), change to directory for which you want to print the file listing and then type the following command.

dir > print.txt

This will creat a directory listing and store the output in a text file called print.txt Once you created the file you can open it any text editor and print the content or alternatively you can directly print from command prompt by using this command –

print print.txt

When your print is complete just remove the file.

Method -2 – Add a menu option in Explorer for printing Directory Listing –

If you frequently print listing of files you can add a menu option in context menu of Explorer for printing the file list stored in a folder, to do so by using following steps –

1. Create a batch file called Printdir.bat. To do so pen Notepad or another text editor and type (or cut and paste) following text:

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