5 commons tips to speed up your computer

A friend of mine just reformatted his computer and few days after, he quite stressful as his computer run a little bit slower. He also wondered why his C drive partition is almost 3 quarters full out of 20 GB. Summing up all the size of the folders will result in great descrepancy with the size retrieved from partition C properties.

Well, these are 5 tips that I always use to speed up my computer and it also explains where those space chunks have been lost to.

1. Turn off all the windows effects

This is the feature that will enable Windows XP to look sleek with fade in fade out effect and crisp menu. Turning this off will decrease the drain of your system’s memory. You can easily turn off this feature by pressing [Windows] + [Pause/Break] to launch the Systems Properties dialog box. Then, click on Advanced tab and you will see three ‘Settings’ buttons. Click the one related to "Performance" (at the top).

The dialog box called Performance Options will pop up. Under Visual Effects tab, select ‘Adjust for best performance’ and click Apply. This will effectively turn off all the windows effects.

2. Turn off System Restore
System Restore uses a lot of space in C partition and reduces computer performance. You can turn this off by pressing [Windows] + [Pause Break] to open system properties. Click on System Restore tab, and select "Turnoff System Restore on all drives" and click "Apply".

If you wish to use this feature make sure you do the following. Right click on C: partition then click on properties > disk cleanup and it will take a minute or two (depends on your computer performance) before "disk cleanup" window popups. Once it popups, click everything in "disk cleanup" tab and go to "more option" tab. There are 3 "clean up" buttons and click on the one related to System Restore. Click OK to effectively clean up the old restore points and the space consumed in various places in "disk cleanup" tab.

note:It will delete all restore points but the recent one.

3. Defragment your disk drives

Defragment your drives once in a week and it will speed up your computer since data can be accessed much more faster. To access the defragmenter, click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.

4. Virtual memory Optimisation

The virtual memory is the amount of space used for Windows XP as if it were RAM. By default, the space is taken from C drive which explains why a lot of spaces seem to be "lost" from the C drive. In order to speed up your computer, you need to set such that the space for virtual memory is taken from other physical drive or is taken from other drive partition.

To access the virtual memory setting, press [Windows] + [Pause Break] to get to the system properties dialog box. Go to "Advanced" tab, click on the Performance "setting" and again go to Advanced tab in "Performance Options" windows.

Make sure ‘programs’ is selected for both Processor scheduling and Memory usage. Now under Virtual memory, click on change.

Select the drive where the page file is currently present (usually C drive), select ‘No Paging File’ and click on ‘Set’. Now select the drive where you wish to place your page file (other partition drive or other physical drive), and select ‘Custom size’. Enter the exact numbers from the previous setting in dialog boxes and click on ‘Set’ (i.e. the minimum size and maximum size from page file setting of the C drive). Click on ‘Set’ button.

Now click OK and restart the computer. Up to this step you will now notice a lot of spaces in you C drive have been "retrieved".

5. Update Windows
Keep your computer updated and it's highly recommended that you use Windows XP Service Pack 2. This will ensure unknown security to be resolved and fixing the stability problems, hence stable system.

Please let me know if these tips helpful to speed up your computer performance.

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