Speed Up Windows XP

Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 3

Read Part 1  —  Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1

Read Part 2 —  Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 2

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10. Perform a Boot Defragment

This is simplest way to improve boot speed for your Windows XP box. For most of windows installation it is already enabled, but you should double check it and enable it if not. To do so follow these steps –

  1. Click Start > Select Run > Type Regedit > hit enter.
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftDfrgBootOptimizeFunction
  3. Set / Check the value of Enable string value to Y,  if it is not already set to Y.
  4. Exit the Registry and Reboot.

Boot defragment, when set to yes put all system files required during system boot in a block next to each other. This will reduce the seek time for the file and gives you better boot speed.
11. Remove Junk or temp Files.

While running XP Windows create several Temporary files which should be deleted automatically once there use is over. But Windows is not that sufficient and it leaves the file behind even when it is no longer required.

There are several ways to remove this files, and windows also have an inbuilt tool to do so. Also there are several clean up utilities available in market. One of such clean up tool which is highly recommended is CCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/). it is free also.

ccleaner-1

Just Install and run the Ccleaner, hit analyze and then once analysis is finished hit Run CCleaner button…and you are done..

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Continue ReadingTips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 3

Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 2

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-kitThis 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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Continue ReadingTips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 2

Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1

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.

windows-disk-check-utility2. 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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Continue ReadingTips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1