- Convert your hard drive to NTFS. If your drive is using FAT16 or FAT32, you can gain performance by converting it to NTFS.
- To do so, click on the start menu, go to Run, type cmd. type "CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS" (without quotes). Follow the instructions and your drive will be converted to NTFS. Bear in mind that NTFS drives can only be accessed by Windows 2000/NT/XP and Vista. Older versions of Windows are only compatible with FAT, FAT16 and FAT32.
- Remove Malware from your system.. Spyware comes bundled with a lot of free software found on the Internet. It can slow your machine down to a crawl. Download and install Spybot Search & Destroy[1], start your computer in Safe Mode and give your machine a full scan for spyware.
- Empty prefetch folder. The use of the prefetch directory is to hold cached information regarding recently accessed files. Application as well as boot files are cached here. You can delete all the files within the Prefetch directory (C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch) that will allow faster boot times due to less file cache reading. Within the registry, you can set prefetch to function in several different ways. Prefetch can cache applications, boot up files, both, or you can disable it completely. To improve boot speed set the following value in the registry to a value of 2: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher
- Disable the Indexing Service. The indexing service scans your hard drive and indexes files to help speed up searching. It runs in the background using up memory and processor time, and is generally thought to be unnecessary by most geeks. It can also wake you up if your hard disk is noisy and you leave your machine on at night. To disable the Indexing Service, open My Computer, Right-click on the hard drive, go to properties and click on the check box to clear the check mark next to "Allow indexing service to index this hard drive for faster searching". Click OK. It may take a while for the operation to complete.
- Reduce Visual Effects Reduce Windows XP can look good ...but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. To optimize, go to Start, right click My Computer, and go to the Advanced tab in the Performance area click Settings, and choose "Adjust for best performance". If you still want to keep the look of Windows XP, you can leave the last 3 check boxes selected. It is recommended that you do uncheck these boxes when installing a big or graphics heavy program (like the Adobe programs). Sometimes unchecking these will help rendering pictures, movies or listening music.
- To speed up folder browsing: Open My Computer > click on the Tools menu Folder Options, look for View tab>Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers and Launch folders in a separate process check box > Click Apply > Click OK.
- To make menus load faster, go to Start, click on Run, and then type regedit and press Enter/Return. Now find "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop", Select MenuShowDelay, right click and select “Modify’, reduce the number to around 100, but not too less.
- Disabling unnecessary services. Windows XP has to be all things to all people it has many services running that take up system resources that you may never need. Below is a list of services that can be disabled on most machines: Alerter, Clipbook, Computer Browser, Distributed Link Tracking Client, Indexing Service, IPSEC Services, Messenger, Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing, Portable Media Serial Number, Remote Desktop Help Session Manager, Remote Procedure Call Locator, Remote Registry, Secondary Logon, Routing & Remote Access, Server, SSDP Discovery Service, Telnet, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, Upload Manager, Universal Plug and Play Device Host, Windows Time wireless Zero Configuration (Do not disable if you use a wireless network). To disable these services go to Start Run... and type services.msc, double click on the service you want to change, change the startup type to Disable.
- Speeding up Folder Access, disable Last Access Update. Go to Start and then Run... and type regedt32, click through the file system until you arrive at “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem”, Right-click in a blank area of the window on the right and select DWORD Value to Create a new DWORD Value. Call it NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and then Right click on the new value and select Modify, change the Value Data to 1, and press enter.
- How to improve boot times Go to Start Menu and Click Run, then type in regedt32 then press Enter. Find “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction”, Select “Enable” from the list on the right, right click on it and select Modify, change the value to Y to enable, and press enter, and close the window. Now click on Start, click on Run, type in msconfig and click OK. Click on the Startup tab and uncheck every item you don't need. Do NOT disable entries added by antivirus and antispyware programs as doing so will make your computer more vulnerable to viruses and malware.
- Improve swapfile performance. (Note: some people say that this only helps on Win9x and is useless for Windows NT based systems, including WinXP and Win2000). It basically makes sure that your PC uses every last drop of memory (faster than swap file) before it starts using the swap file.Go to Start, click Run, type msconfig and then press Enter. Click on the System.ini tab, and expand the 386enh tab by clicking on the plus sign. click on new then in the blank box type ”ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1". Press enter, and restart your pc to see the changes take effect.
- Improve your XP's shutdown speed. This tweak reduces the time XP waits before automatically closing any running programs when you give it the command to shutdown. Go to Start, run, and then type regedt32 and press Enter. Find "'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop", right click WaitToKillAppTimeout and select ‘Modify’ and then change the value to 1000, and press enter. Right click HungAppTimeout and select Modify. Change the value to 1000. Press enter and find "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control", right click WaitToKillServiceTimeout and select ‘Modify’ and then change the value to 1000, and press enter.
- Removing the background image on your desktop. Right click the Desktop click Properties, and go to the Desktop Tab. change the wallpaper to None. This will greatly speed up windows xp and while your at it go to the Settings Tab, Colour Setting, and change it to Medium (16 bit).
- Removing unwanted programs Go to Start, Control panel click Add or Remove Programs, remove unwanted programs.
