System Speedup Tips and Tricks

Stuff to do before applying these tips and tricks

Before going into detail with the speedup tips and tricks, let me remind you that if your system performance is severely clogging down it’s probably because one of these reasons:

1. not enough processing and RAM power (for example, running Windows XP on a PC with 128 RAMs will pretty much mean that you will get constant performance drops when running RAM hungry programs)
2. the files on your hard disk are heavily fragmented and you might be required to run a defrag program
3. you have a lot of adware/spyware/viruses eating up right through your resources (or not necessarily a lot of them, but a more hungry one ;) )
4. there’s not enough disk space on your system partition for temporary file storing (a minimum of 1 gigabyte is advisable)
5. you have a lot of programs running in the background, each of them taking its fair share of memory

Now, fixing the above stated problems is bound to fix your performance issues. Buying some more RAM, defragging your hard disk, removing malicious programs, freeing up disk space and temporarily closing or uninstalling unused programs will have a huge effect on speeding up your system and the following tips and tricks should only be used if the above mentioned issues can’t be fixed, they don’t dish out the results you were after or you’re simply a performance freak that wants to squeeze every drop of power from his or her computer and operating system.

Faster shutdown – You will need to open the Windows Registry, so press “Windows Button” + “R” (the Windows button is typically situated between the “CTRL” and “ALT” buttons and has the Windows logo on it) and type “regedit”. Look for the directory HKEY_CURRENT_USER and double click on it. Double click on Control Panel in the left tab menu. Look for and select “Desktop”. In the right tab menu you will see a bunch of functions such as “ActiveWndTrkTimeout”, “CoolSwitch”, “CaretWidth” , etc. Select the one called “AutoEndTasks”, right click on it and select “Modify”. Change the value from 0 to 1. This is a binary value that tells Windows what to do on shutdown. If set on 0, Windows will allow each of the active programs to close down by themselves (oftentimes this can last an annoyingly long time or it can even crash your PC) and if set on 1 it will automatically end all active programs.

Disabling the Index Service – the index service is a program used by Windows to preload and index the files on your computer and it often eats a lot of RAM causing system slugdowns. The process is totally unnecessary, unless you search for stuff on your computer every minute or so. To disable it, open up the Control Panel, Click on Add/Remove Programs, Click on “Add/Remove Windows Components” and uncheck the “Indexing Services” box.

Faster Folder Browsing – this is not necessarily a performance issue, but it will definitely get you rid of an annoyance. Whenever you browse through your own folders using Windows Explorer, there will be a small delay (at times it’s not so small as to be unnoticeable) caused by the fact that each time you enter a new folder, the operating system does an automated check to see if there are any network files, shared files, links and printers in that folder. To disable this check, open “My Computer”, click on the “Tools” menu, click on “Folder Options” and “View”. Uncheck the box saying “Search for Network folders and Printers”, “Apply” and you got yourself a faster folder browsing.