In At The Bleep End

Speeding up slow PCs

There are plenty of sites telling you how to speed up XP. Some of the tips found out there are useless and some are just plain wrong. The following are safe and worth trying, especially the first one.

Turn off display effects
You don't need the various display effects and styles used in XP and they slow the PC down a fair bit. To turn them off...
1. Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop or in your start panel and select properties.
2. Next, Click on the Advanced tab and hit the setting button under performance.
3. On the visual effects tab, select Adjust for Best Performance and hit OK.
4. Hit OK once more to exit system properties.

Turn off Symantec Network Drivers Service (Norton/Symantec users only)
By default, Norton scans any shared network drives mounted on a PC. In a network situation where all desktops and all servers have their own antivirus protection this is not required and slows things down for everyone.
Turn it off by Start > Run > Services.msc > right-click 'Symantec Network Drivers' in the list > Properties > Change startup type to 'Disabled' > Click 'Stop' to stop the service > OK out

Disable other services not needed
Turn off 'Error Reporting Service' and 'Themes'. There are other services which can safely be disabled or changed to Manual start rather than automatic. You don't seem to get noticeable performance boost from doing this though.

Turn off indexing on the C drive
Indexing service creates a database index of all files on your system when the system is otherwise idle. Unless you do frequent searches, it is suggested you disable this service.
My Computer > right-click C:drive > properties > uncheck the box `allow indexing service....`
This will take a while. When it comes up with an error message tell it to 'ignore all'

Stop unneccessary programs loading at startup
Remove anything from Start > Programs > Startup which doesn't need to load with the PC (eg. Office and Winzip preloaders)

Check network settings have everything needed entered (Network environment only)

Remove anything not needed from the start menu
eg. 'Set program access and defaults', 'new office document', 'open office document', anything with IBM in the name etc.

Persuade user not to dump everything on the desktop!
It works just like any other regular folder, the less you index, the faster it gets

Run CCleaner to remove useless files
http://www.ccleaner.com/ - use the default settings

Remove programs which are not needed or used
eg. IBM PCs may have a whole batch of useless IBM software which needs removing. Get rid of anything with IBM in it, and 'Support.com' using Add/Remove programs.
PCs which used to have Norton AV on but now use another AV program may still have the Norton Live Update software installed - delete this also.

Speed up start menu
1. Start Regedit. (Click on Run in the start menu, then type "regedit" without the quotes and hit enter)
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
3. Select Menushowdelay from the list on the right.
4. Right on it and select Modify.
5. Change the value to 150, its the perfect speed setting so menus appear quick, but not to quick so that the un-wanted ones appear.
6. Reboot your computer.

Defragment the C drive

Posted by d - 10:40 am - 0 Comments

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