Over 50 tips on HOW TO SPEED UP AND OPTIMIZE WINDOWS XP AND SAVE SPACE

The world is now looking forward to the Windows 7 commercial release, each of us is speculating the mindboggling features it comes loaded with, and whether it is going to be the next big “thing.” Yet XP, Microsoft’s best OS till date, is the choice for the majority – why? Because it is cheap, sturdy, widely supported and extremely user-friendly.

Here are some tips and tweaks to speed up your XP running PC – because even the meanest machines lose that sheen within a few months and function no faster than a 90’s model. Does this happen to you?

1)       You put on the switch, then take your dog out for a walk and find yourself back home while the screen still says “Windows is starting up.”

2)       You click on an item on the screen, then slowly feel your life trickling away like the sand in the “busy” hourglass pointer as nothing happens on screen.

3)      Your computer frequently hangs up and you’re used to the recurring Blue Screen of Death.

4)      You play host to a party of mechanics every other weekend.

Then you’re at the right place! Here’s one of the most complete collections of the safest and the best tricks to speed up PC’s! Although most of them are meant for Xp, almost all work in Vista and some are plain ubiquitous. And all of them have been tried and tested!

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A. MALWARE

Malware, or malicious software are one of the main causes of windows slowdowns. They include virus, spyware, rootkits or just rogue programs.

1.       Use a good antivirus program like AVG or Avira or Avast, or malware removing programs like Malwarebytes’ Antimalware and SuperAntiSpyware to check your computer for existing malware. Remove any, if found. Watch out though – many scanning programs, like the infamous XP Antivirus 2008, themselves are malware. You can check out the list included within Malwarebytes’ RogueRemover, or any other such list.

2.       Use a firewall. Every time you connect to the internet, you bring in innumerable malware, right from Trojan spyware and Tracking cookies to Virus or worse, lead in a hacker. The Windows Firewall is probably good enough for safe internet users. However, if you want extra safety, use ZoneAlarm or Comodo. Note: Do not run more than one firewall at a time, so remember to disable the windows firewall if you use a third party one.

3.       Get rid of programs like Keenfinder and Relevant Knowledge. Not only do they sit there and use up your resources, they impinge on personal privacy.

4.       Use a safe browser. All the popular ones – Opera, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome (see Cnet Download.com) – have good malware protection and have their own characteristics. Firefox looks coolest, Opera and Safari are vying to become the smallest and the fastest browser, and Internet Explorer has the maximum webpage compatibility (but is old aged and slow!). You can customize the security settings in each of them yourself.

5.       If you use a P2P client, use Peer Guardian to prevent unwanted snooping. Also enable security checks on all the programs you download.

Now, go to Shields-Up To check your security. Don’t worry, this is a completely trusted site. Follow their recommendations to close all unnecessary ports on your computer and change your firewall settings.

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B. CUT OUT THE FAT!!!

CONTROL PANEL

Here’s a list of all those things you can do in Control Panel. Change the view to “Classic View”, because that is how it is described here. Click each icon as given in each heading.

“SYSTEM”

GET RID OF STYLE

Yeah, yeah, so everyone knows windows xp is very sexy to look at, especially with those added themes and alpha-blended graphics. But the super cool look itself maybe costing you much time.

In the System tab, go to Advanced, Performance Settings, Visual Effect and select Adjust for Best Performance. You’ll see the improvement immediately.

Can’t bear to part with the graphics? Then select Custom, and keep only these five: Show Shadows Under Menus, Show Shadows Under Mouse Pointer, Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts, Use Drop Shadows for Icon Labels on the Desktop, and Use visual style on windows and buttons. That provides a significant boost without compromising with the style much.

PAGING FILE

Go to Advanced–> Performance Options–> Advanced–> Virtual Memory.

A paging file is what Windows generally treats as the virtual memory, or RAM. Very few applications directly address the RAM and instead use the paging file. There are several myths about the Paging File, like disabling it or moving it to another partition, which I don’t think are very effective. Make the initial size of the page file 1.5 x your RAM in MB (if you don’t know how much that is, consult System–>General) and the maximum size 3x your RAM in MB. If your RAM equals or exceeds 512MB, you can input both the values as the value of your RAM (so the ratio is 1:1). Completely disabling it might impair several of your programs.

ERROR REPORTING

Go to Error Reporting under Advanced, and select Disable Error Reporting, But notify me if critical Errors Occur. This prevents your computer from repeatedly trying to send information about all your errors to Microsoft, a big resource cruncher.

REMOTE

Go to the tab Remote, and uncheck both the boxes are. Chances are you probably won’t need these services. Keeping these on not only slow down the computer, but also compromise your internet security.

SYSTEM RESTORE

System Restore is a great utility if you are tweaking with the Registry. But note that its uses are very limited, and it doesn’t even apply for your installations or most malware that might enter. You can turn off the System Restore service to save both space and memory. If you must have it on, select each drive manually and bring down the value to 1000 MB or so.

If you are sure your computer is running well and you have made ample backups or just haven’t tweaked with the registry much, you can go to each of the local drives –> Properties –> Disk Cleanup –> More options and delete all but the last Restore point. Note that you cannot individually delete any restore point – they are all stringed together.

WINDOWS UPDATE

Microsoft regularly releases security updates and hotfixes for Windows, and it is highly recommendable to turn on Automatic Updates to keep up with these. Some of these even help you speed up the computer. If you don’t like Automatic Updates using up your bandwidth, keep it turned on to Notify me about updates but do not Download or Install them. You can download them at your leisure.

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ADD OR REMOVE PROGRAMS

Check and remove any programs you do not need or do not use.  Also, go to Add/Remove Windows Components and uncheck all the components you don’t need – these include, on an average desktop computer: Fax Services, Indexing Service, IIS, Management and Monitoring Tools, MSN Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Messenger. And you might even remove some of the components of Accessories if you do not need them, like maybe the card games.

DISPLAY PROPERTIES

Under Display–> Desktop, get rid of the wallpaper. Grand as it may look, you have no idea how much resources it hogs, especially during startup.

Under Screensaver, select to none. This has some sort of effect on your performance, but it is more of a personal preference. And anyway, it is not advisable to leave on the monitor if you are not using it – you could be wasting upto 9 kg of carbon on an average. Turn it off when you go for a drink, or when you are listening to music, or waiting for an installation to complete.

FOLDER OPTIONS

Under General–> Tasks, select Use Windows Classic Folders.

Under View, uncheck Automatically search for network folders and printers. This prevents Windows from automatically searching for printers every time you open Windows Explorer. You can change the other settings too to your liking, like showing all files and folders, but most of them do not have much impact on performance.

FONTS

Another memory hogger – Fonts. Chances are you’ll never even use half the fonts available by default, so it is better to delete them. Every time you boot, windows loads these fonts into memory. Keep the few basic ones – Trebuchet, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Ms Sans Serif and Arial, and get rid of the others. By getting rid of I mean, copy the font files to some other folder (not within c:\WINDOWS), and delete them from the Font folder.

INTERNET OPTIONS

Under the general tab, you are presented with several choices for Internet Explorer (nb: you can also access the internet options directly from the internet explorer options). If you want to speed up explorer startup, type “about:none” in the homepage textbox without the quotes, or choose whichever homepage you’d like. Just in case you didn’t know, a homepage is what your browser opens up to the first thing you start it.

Deleting your browsing history and browser cache dramatically speeds up your internet browsing and prevents potential security threats. However, if you are on a slow connection, you may want to keep the cache for faster access to webpages. Under the browsing history area, choose Delete Browsing History on Exit, or do it manually with Delete.

Under Privacy, enable pop-up blocker. This ensures a smoother and safer web experience.

Under Advanced–>Browsing, uncheck Enable visual styles to get a faster performance.

Under Advanced–>Security, uncheck  “Allow active content from CDs to run on my computer”, “Allow active content to run in files on my computer” and “Allow software to run or install if the signature is invalid”. Generally internet explorer is by default set to very sensible options.

POWER OPTIONS

Under Power Schemes, you might want to lower the value for Turn off Monitor After, but this is completely your preference.

Under Advanced, uncheck both the options.

Under Hibernation, disable Hibernation if you are a Desktop user. This is another step that will save large amounts of memory. I’ve heard laptop users often make use of this, so if you have a laptop, keep this on.

REGIONAL AND LANGUAGE OPTIONS

If you do not use any script other than English, it is a very good idea to go to Language and uncheck the supplemental language support boxes.

SOUNDS

Unless you can’t live without Windows’ cutesy little themes to let you know you are opening a menu or shutting down, go to Sounds and choose the Sound Scheme as No Sounds, or disable all of them manually.  Just for safety’s sake, you might want to keep on Asterisk, Critical Stop, Default Beep and Exclamation.

TASKBAR AND START MENU

Under Taskbar, try to remove everything that might be weighing down your computer during startup. Disable the QuickLaunch. If you are really dependent on it, you can instead use Launchy, a better program (but not really lightweight) found on www.launchy.net.

Under Start Menu–> Customize–> Advanced, uncheck List my recent Documents. This will save a lot from your startup. When you’ve done this, you might even remove My Recent Documents from the Start Menu manually.

USER ACCOUNTS

Click Change the Way Users Log On or Off, and uncheck Use Fast User Switching. That is, if you are not in a corporate office when someone might try to grab hold of the computer before you are done. Anyway, the so called “personalized settings” are all available from all users, unless you’ve used third party locks.

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RECYCLE BIN

Right-click Recycle Bin–>Properties. Under the Global Tab, uncheck Display Delete Confirmation Dialog. This prevents windows from repeatedly asking you “Are you sure you want to delete?” The files are always stored in the Recycle Bin if you want to change your mind. Note that Windows will still ask you to confirm when you try to permanently delete files. If in the end, you do end up completely deleting a necessary file and have not defragmented or wiped the free space or installed big files in between, you can use Piriform’s Recuvato recover you deleted files.

While you are at it, reduce the maximum size of the Recycle Bin to something more manageable, like 5% or 3%. Saves a lot of disk space, trust me.

MINIMALISTIC WINDOWS EXPLORER

This option might not be exactly designed to save time, it’s completely optional. It increases the space available in windows explorer for better viewing.

By this time, if you have removed the folder task pane, you’ll already have cleared nearly a 4^th of your screen space. Now right click on the toolbar, and click Customize. In the bottom of the dialog that appears, select Small icons and No Text Labels. Then remove all the buttons you do not need. Typically, I keep only Back, Up, Forward, Search and Folders – all the others can accessed by keyboard shortcuts or by right-clicking on the explorer window. For example, you can refresh by pressing F5 (or however it is configured in your system), you can copy, cut, paste, delete or access the file properties by directly right-clicking the required file, then you won’t need full screen, cause what you’ll get after clearing up is just one cm short of the full screen view; Views can be accessed by right-clicking on any empty space on the window.

Next, right click on the toolbar, unselect Lock the Toolbars. Adjust the File- Edit- View toolbar only as far as the space it takes up, and pull up the Standard Buttons and Address toolbars to the same line. The end product will be something like this:

MSCONFIG

The built-in System Configuration Utility (press [Win] + R and then type msconfig) provides the basic tools to control your startup. In the General Tab, select Selective Startup, then check both System.INI and Win.INI. Next, under the Boot.INI Tab, select NOGUIBOOT. This will remove the Windows XP Screen that you can see at startup, saving a few seconds. Note you cannot also see notifications like Check Disk and Registry Defrag if you remove the guiboot (although they’ll run fine all the same). Just remember to enable the guiboot every time you schedule anything such to occur at the next boot.

Now go to the Services Tab. Since hopefully you will have sorted out all the Microsoft services before, check Hide all MS Services. See now what you don’t need to run at startup and disable them.

Next, under the Startup Tab, disable all the programs you don’t need at startup. While most might look pretty important, remember hardly any of them except maybe the antivirus, firewall and search programs start work before you do. If you can’t decide on what to disable, download Malwarebytes’ StartupLite from their website. It has fairly good descriptions of the startup utilites.

DESKTOP

To speed up startup, remove all items from desktop – that is, all possible. Never keep any programs on the desktop, but only shortcuts. Even then, remove as many shortcuts as possible. Right click on the desktop, select Properties. We’re back in the Display Tab. Go to Desktop–> Customize Desktop. Uncheck all the desktop icons (you can always access them from the start menu) and the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

Feeling the need for those icons? Then you can right click on the taskbar, and under Toolbar click Desktop. In the extreme right end of the taskbar, the label “Desktop” will come up. Right click on the taskbar again, and select Lock the Taskbar. This will actually unlock the taskbar, if it was locked before. Then pull the divider upto the extreme left side, so that all the standard desktop icons are visible. Done! Lock the taskbar again.

Or better, you can use a free laucher program like Launchy (www.launchy.net), and get rid of all desktop icons forever.

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C. SYSTEM MAINTENANCE

DISK CHECK

Before you defragment, you should check your disk for all errors.

To do so, right click on each drive, select Properties–>Tools–>Error Checking. Check both the boxes, and select Check Now. Do it for all the drives. For the system drive, windows will need to reboot.

DEFRAG

Every new program that is installed gets fragmented into many parts on the hard disk. Defragmenting lines up these fragments for ease of access and faster use. Besides, restore points, boot trace files, the page file and the registry also get fragmented.

Now you can always use XP’s built in defragmenter, but it has innumerable drawbacks. It is slow, never lets you defrag all the files, and demands that at least 15% be left free for defragmentation. It would be preferable to use a program like Auslogics Disk Defrag or SmartDefrag– they are faster and do not force you to sit idle while the defragmenter is running.

Sysinternals’ Page Defrag –> Download this and unzip. No need to install, run it and see if the pagefile and registry are fragmented enough to be defragged. If you think so, select Defrag At Next Boot and leave. This utility will surely increase your computer’s performance.

PREFETCH

The Prefetch is a very useful utility, allowing files to be viewed easily by “prefetching” them. Some tweaks suggest cleaning up the C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch folder, however this is not advisable as this actually slows down program success. Plus the Prefetch folder never really takes up much space, as all files older than a fixed no. of days are removed. To ensure your Prefetch is working correctly, run the Prefetcher Fix. This will restore your prefetch to the optimal state – active and empty.

SERVICES

Make sure you are monitoring all the changes you make here. This gives one of the best performance boosts you can want. Right, so Windows has a lot of Services running in the background, but many don’t need to be there. There are many others that need not start with boot. Here’s what I keep disabled on my computer:

Alerter,

Application Management,

Automatic Updates (provided you check the Microsoft Update site regularly),

Clipbook,

Computer Browser,

Distributed Link Tracking Client,

Distribution Transaction Coordinator,

Error Reporting Service,

Fast User Switching Compatibility,

Human Interface Device Access,

Indexing Service (next to useless),

IPSEC Services,

Messenger,

MS Office Diagnostics Service,

Net Logon,

NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing,

Network DDE,

Network DDE DSDM,

Print Spooler (I don’t have a printer),

QoS RSVP,

Remote Desktop Help Session Manager,

Remote Registry,

Routing and Remote Access,

Secondary Logon,

Sony SPTI Service,

SSDP Discovery Service,

Telnet,

UPS,

UPnP Device Host,

Volume Shadow Copy,

VRAID Log Service,

Webclient,

Windows Media Player Networking Sharing Service,

Wireless Zero Configuration,

WMI Performance Adapter,

Workstation

Depending on your version and program, the services you have available will differ. Here’s the Elder Geek’s guide for the Windows Services.

REGISTRY

Before doing anything mentioned in this section, you should make a system restore point – the registry is a very delicate thing.

Remove recent docs: First, we’ll look at getting rid of all the recent documents Windows stores. It takes up enough of your startup just to decide what history to put in each application plus in Windows history, not to mention the privacy threats from anyone who can physically access the computer. You can remove the history traces yourself, or can make this change in the registry to make sure no history is there for Windows at least – go to Start Menu–> Run (or press [Win] + R) and type “regedit” without quotes. In the Registry editor that pops up, go to HKEY_CURENT_USER–>Software–>Microsoft–>Windows–>Current Edition–>Policies–>Explorer. Go to Edit–>New–>DWORD Value, name the Dword value as NoRecentDocsHistory (case doesn’t matter), and in hexadecimal, put the value as 1.

And oh, did I forget – this will also rid MS Word of its recent documents?

Reducing killing time of hung applications: Go to HKEY_Current_ User–>Control Panel–>Desktop (do not expand Desktop, just click on it). Double-click on WaitToKillAppTImeout, and change the value to 1000. Change the value of HungAppTimeout to 3000 also in the same dialog.

DMA

Right click on My computer, and click “Manage”. Double click on Device Manager, then expand the IDE controllers branch. Select each of the separate IDE channels, right click them, click on Advanced Settings in the dialog box, and set Transfer Mode as “DMA if available.”

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D. UTILITIES :

BOOTVIS

Much is said about defragging your normal files, but there are parts of your windows installation folder no normal defragger would touch – the pagefile and registry in question. If you change your drivers, or add or remove startup programs, you also need to defrag another part – the boot files. Windows does it by itself three days after any such installation when the machine is idle. Microsoft once released the utility !!!Bootvis!!! to do this for you. It is not supported anymore, but it works just fine on most machines.

Download and install bootvis. Keep your Task Scheduler and COM+ Event System services automatic for this to run. Run bootvis, and from the Tools menu, select Next Boot + Driver Delays. Select OK, and Reboot Now. After the system reboots, wait while the trace file is written – there would be a dialog while it is still being written. When it finishes, you’ll be given the statistics of your boot. Go to Tools again, select Optimize System, and follow the instructions to reboot. This time, wait while your boot files are laid out on the disk for faster startup. The gain in startup time will vary from machine to machine.

If Bootvis doesn’t work, you’ll have to do this manually. Reboot Windows XP two times, each time wait one full minute after the desktop appears to allow Windows time to fully write to the NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.PF file before proceeding, then go to “Start”, “Run”, Type Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks. This can take 10-15 minutes to run but no notification will be given when it is finished. You will notice increased hard drive activity while it is running – wait until this stops. When this is finished, in the “Run” box Type defrag c: -b and wait until the command prompt window disappears.

After this is done, it is advisable to defrag your hard drive – the trace file bootvis writes generally has too many clusters.

SP3

Get service pack 3 for Windows XP if you’re running service pack 2. Besides many  useful updates, SP3 provides some of the shutdown supplements of Vista, which will boost the speed of your computer.

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E. WHAT TO DO WHEN NOTHING ELSE WORKS

VACUUM CLEAN THE CPU

Sometimes, the root of the problem lies not in the software, but the hardware. If you feel comfortable enough, turn off the computer, unplug the power cord, and take off the CPU cover. If you don’t feel confident, get an expert to do this. Using a lint-free cloth, a brush and a jet of air from the vacuum cleaner, you should have the dust-bunnies disintegrated in no time. Deposition of dust, especially on the fan can slow down your computer like nothing.

REINSTALL WINDOWS AND FORMAT

This is a very trusted and old advice – reinstall your Windows at least once every year or two years. Don’t ask me why, but it always works for me and most others I’ve asked. Whether you should format your disk drives depends largely on what sort it is. Make sure it is formatted in NTFS (the default choice nowadays, just mentioning in case), and contact your manufacturer before formatting.

UPDATE/ REINSTALL DRIVERS

To get to a more advanced portion, update your device drivers. Newer drivers provide better performance, better startup and shutdown – if your computer’s going slow even though you’ve followed most of the instructions here, probably one or more of your drivers have not been installed correctly. Plenty of free programs like RadarSync as well as paid programs like Driver Genius and Driver Magician are available in the market to update your drivers. If you want to avoid these software, manufacturers like NVidia and VIA provide driver updates on their homepages according to your hardware.

Before you start installing the new driver files, create a system restore point and backup your existing drivers. Driver update programs will do all that for you at the click of a mouse button.

Also, just as in the case with your windows, try just reinstalling all your drivers from scratch. That was my case when I was caught with a startup time of 5 minutes with nothing I’d left undone – reinstalling the whole batch of drivers instantly brought down the startup to 1 minute!!