The economy sucks immoral trying to save money wherever we can especially on less than necessary purchases such as new computers. there just isn’t enough money to go around. And so here’s a money saving tips to keep your old computer from needing to be replaced as quickly.
1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data - One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. Disk fragmentation really can slow down your computer. To speed up the response time, you should monthly run Disk Defragmenter, a Windows utility that defrags and consolidates fragmented files. There are also several paid apps available as well.
2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors - Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors can severly hurt disk performance. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It will meticulously search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for better performance.
3. Disable Indexing Services - Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. It’s very annoying. It also doesn’t work as well as Google Desktop for searching your files. Disable it fast and speed up your machine.
4. Optimize Display Settings - Windows XP is a looker. But it costs you system resources that are used to display all the visual items and effects. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave only a few necessary bells and whistles.
5. Speedup Folder Browsing - You may have noticed that everytime you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing speed, you can disable the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” option.
6. Disable Performance Counters - Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. These utilities take up system resources so disabling is a good idea.
7. Optimize Your Pagefile - You can optimize your pagefile. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile. Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have 512MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size.
8. Remove Fonts for Speed - Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require. Unless you are a gfx designer, you shouldn’t need 1,000 fonts. Arial, Verdana, and the rest of the built-in fonts are more than enough to suit most users.
9. Use a Flash Memory to Boost Performance - To improve performance, you need to install additional RAM memory. It’ll let you boot your OS much quicker and run many applications and access data quicker. There is no easiest and more technically elegant way to do it than use eBoostr. eBoostr is a little program that lets you improve a performance of any computer, powered by Windows XP in much the same way as Vista’s ReadyBoost. With eBoostr, if you have a flash drive, such as a USB flash thumb drive or an SD card, you can use it to make your computer run better. Simply plug in a flash drive through a USB socket and Windows XP will use eBoostr to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.
10. Perform a Boot Defragment - There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster. On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently.
I hope this article help you improve your computer’s performance. Even just a little. here’s a bonus tip for you if you browse the web or a lot, you should check out Google’s new browser is the fastest browser currently available and could really speed up your Web applications as well.
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