Your old PC is oddly slow? What could you do? You can follow these simple tips! Each can enhance the performance and reliability of PC. Best of all, all of them will cost you nothing. This is the last part of three article on how speed up windows XP. If you miss the others two visit How to speed up Windows XP part 1 and How to speed up Windows XP part 2.
Remove the background image.
This will greatly speed up Windows XP. To do this:
- right click the Desktop and click “Properties”
- go to the “Desktop” tab and change the wallpaper to “None”
- finally go to the “Settings” tab, and change “Colour quality” to “Medium (16 bit)”.
Swap file.
The Swap file or page-file is a reserved portion of a hard disk that is used as an extension of random access memory (RAM) for data in RAM that hasn’t been used recently. The file should be set twice your RAM size. Go to My Computer > Properties > Performance tab. If you have 4Gb of RAM, Windows XP is unable to use it all. Typically XP is limited to about 3.25Gb – so you have approx .75 Gb of hidden RAM that is can be used for a high speed swap file. To get access to this free RAM, use the totally free VSuite Ramdisk Free Edition RAM Disk utility.
Perform a disk clean up.
Clean up your disk quickly to remove unnecessary files. To do this:
- press WinKey + R and type in “cleanmgr.exe” then press Enter.
- Press “OK”. This can take a while.
Defragment Your Computer.
This place similar files physically closer on the hard disk and help improve load speeds.
- press WinKey + R and type in “dfrg.msc” then press Enter.
- Click “Defrag” to start it.
Remove unwanted programs.
Go to Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs and remove unwanted programs and free up some space.
Remove malware from your system.
If you use free software, as all people in the world, probably in your machine there are some spyware that can slow your machine down.
- download and install Spybot Search & Destroy
- start your computer in Safe Mode
- scan for spyware.
Remove Spyware and Viruses.
Spyware and viruses make your computer slow because they take up your processor time for reading, storing and reporting your activity to several spy databases. To eliminate them:
- if you have pop ups, consider downloading Ad-Aware. This program scan your computer for the annoying pop ups (“adware”) and eliminate them
- to protect against malware and spyware you can download Spyware Blaster or Spybot
- for viruses download a free copy of AVG – Anti-Vir Guard or Avira – Anti-Vira guard. They are free for personal use
- Microsoft offer the free Windows Defender that it is a widely-used anti-spyware tool distributed freely for users with a genuine copy of Windows. To be honest I don’t like very much this tool.
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