Top 10 Tips To Boost Your Windows XP Performance

Frequent data access, data files and defragging disk

One of the reasons that slow down the computer performance is fragmentation of disks. When files are fragmented, the computer has to find the pieces on the hard disk when the file is opened and assemble it. To improve the speed of response then you have to regularly execute the utility Disk Defragmenter, through windows, which defragments and merges the fragment files thereby helping the computer to respond faster.

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

Select the drives you want to defrag and click Analyze

Click Defragment

Detect and Repair Disk Errors

Bad sectors over time, appear on your hard disk. Bad sectors can slow down hard disk performance, and sometimes make even writing data a challenge or impossible. Windows has an inbuilt tool called Error Checking utility which will help you to detect and fix disk errors. It’ll look for bad sectors and system errors on the hard disk and fix them to speed up performance.

Follow Start > My Computer

Right click the hard disk that you want to scan in My Computer and click Properties

Click the Tools tab

Click Check Now

Tick the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box

Click Start

Disable Indexing Services

Indexing Services is a small app that consumes a lot of processor time. It helps you search for something faster as it does not scan through all the files, rather scans the index list by indexing and updating lists of all the files and tables on the computer. If you know where your files are, though, you can even disable this system service. Won’t hurt your machine at all, and whether or not you search often, you won’t be seeing any harm.

Go to Start

Click Settings

Click Control Panel

Right-Click My Computer→ Properties→ Add/Remove Programs.

Select the Add/Remove Window Components

Remove the check marks from the Indexing services

Click Next

Optimize Display Settings

Windows XP is a looker. However, it uses system resources which would be used to render all the visual items, effects, etc. If you turn off most of the settings, Windows looks decent.

Show shadows under menus

Display shadows beneath mouse pointer

Display transparent selection rectangle

Display icon labels on the desktop with drop shadows

Enable visual styles: this makes the windows and buttons put on visual styles.

Speedup Folder Browsing

You might be noticing that there is this little delay every time you open My Computer to browse folders. This is due to the fact that every time you open Windows Explorer, Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers. So to get rid of this and also to make browsing faster you need to disable the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” option.

Disable Performance Counters

Windows XP has a performance monitor utility, which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. Disabling is a good idea as these utilities occupy resources in the system.

Install the Extensible Performance Counter List(http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/exctrlst-o.asp)

The ‘Extensible performance counters’ window, select each counter in turn and devour check uncheck ‘performance counters enabled‘ checkbox at the bottom button below

Optimize Your Pagefile

Make adjustments to the pagefile. Making the pagefile size fixed so the operating system does not have to keep resizing the pagefile.

Click on My Computer and then Properties

Select the Advanced tab

Click Settings under Performance

Click on the Advanced tab yet again and click Change under Virtual Memory

Select the drive that contains your page file, and set the Initial Size of the file equal to the Maximum Size of the file.

By default, Windows XP configures the page file for approximately 1.5 times the actual physical memory. This extra virtual memory is great on systems with 512MB or less of memory, but a typical XP desktop machine is highly unlikely to ever need 1.5 X 512MB or more of virtual memory. If your memory is lower than 512MB, set the page file to default. The ratio should change to 1:1 page file size compared to physical memory size if you have 512MB or larger.

Remove Fonts for Speed

TrueType fonts, in particular, use a fair amount of system resource. To keep your font list up to a minimum, remove any fonts that you would not be using on day to day basis, also leave the fonts that applications might need.

Open Control Panel

Open Fonts folder

Drag fonts you don’t need to a temporary directory (C:\FONTBKUP?) in case you want or need to return a few of them. Every single font you open is eating into your system resources — the less you have, the more free resources you will earn.

Speed Dank: Use a Flash Memory

If you want to increase the function, you have to include more RAM memory elements. Well, it lets your OS boot them much faster, which allows many applications to run faster and access data faster as well. Basically, the easiest and more technically elegant way is using eBoostr.

eBoostr is a small application that allows you to increase the performance of any Windows XP powered computer, similar to Vista’s ReadyBoost. But, with eBoostr, if you have a flash drive, like a USB flash thumb drive or an SD card laying around, you can use that to boost your computer's performance. Simply connect a flash drive in a USB port and Windows XP will use eBoostr to access the flash memory for better performance.

Because the product shows the best results for the most used applications and data, this becomes an impressive boost for users running office programs, graphics applications, or development tools. This will undoubtedly be of particularly strong interest for owners of laptops, since laptop upgrade is generally a more involved matter and laptop hard drives are slower than those of desktops by definition.

Perform a Boot Defragment

A very simple solution that will help your XP startup faster: Have your system perform a boot defragment, it means that all your booting files will be lined-up next to each other on the hard disk. The closer boot files are to each other, the faster your system will boot.

There's a choice to do boot defragmentation on most systems that should be enabled by default but may not be on yours or might have accidentally been switched off. Step 1: To verify boot defragment is turned on: