Does it seem like everything has somehow gone downhill from the day you purchased your new computer? Do programs that once loaded blindingly fast creep onto the screen? Does it seem like your downloads are getting slower and your computer has gone from running swiftly to performing a slow crawl? Chances are your computer could use some attention to make it run faster. We’ll show you some easy ways to improve the performance of any computer running Windows XP.

Before we start, however, a word of caution: You should never (for this read, absolutely never) start tinkering with your computer until you have made a full backup of everything of value and that you aren’t prepared to lose. It’s Murphy’s Law that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will do so in the most inconvenient way. If your valuable files, emails and photos are backed up, then if the worst does happen you’ll have copies of all the important stuff somewhere other than on a computer that no longer functions. Also, never do anything if you don’t understand what you’re doing. For example, when cleaning your disk by deleting files, only delete those you have created yourself. Other files that you don’t recognise are program or Windows files that may be necessary to the smooth running of your computer - delete these entirely at your peril!

In this article, we’ve deliberately avoided providing instructions for optimising techniques, like overclocking your CPU. While it is possible to increase the speed of your computer’s components by changing settings in its BIOS setup, using many of these tweaks voids your warranty and may damage your computer. We’ve addressed only techniques generally considered to be safe to use. Before you tweak anything, it’s also a good idea to save a Restore Point so you can recover your Windows settings if anything goes amiss. To do this, choose Start>All Programs>Accessories> System Tools>System Restore and choose Create a Restore Point. Click Next, type a name for it and click Create.

 

Removing programs
Like many other computer users, you probably download and install programs, use them a few weeks and then forget about them. Programs consume valuable space on your disk and in the Windows Registry. You can free this up, and speed up your computer, by removing programs you don’t use. To remove programs, choose Start>Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs and browse the list for programs that can be deleted. When you select a program you’ll see when you last used it, how often you use it and how much space it consumes. To remove it, click the Change/Remove button and step through the removal process. If you’re asked if you want to remove a file that could be a shared file, answer No if you don’t know if other programs use it too. In most cases it’s relatively safe to remove files stored in the program’s own folders, but be wary of removing files stored in Windows’ own folders.

 

Cleaning and Defragging
Windows has some tools built in that you can use to optimise your PC. These include the disk cleanup tool and the defragment tool. The disk cleanup tool helps you delete temporary Internet files, downloaded program files and Windows temporary files, as well as unused programs and Windows components. All these files would be hard to find otherwise, and removing them will free disk space and speed up your PC. It also empties the Recycle Bin for you. To run it, choose Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup, then wait as the program analyses your disk. When the dialog appears, you’ll see how much space you can save by removing the files Windows has located. Select the checkboxes for those files you’re happy to remove and click OK to start the process. Click the More Options tab to locate other options, such as a shortcut to the Add or Remove Programs tools, and one for removing out of date System Restore points.

Disk defragmentation (defragging for short) solves a problem caused by simply using your computer. Over time, as you install and remove programs and create files, many files on your hard disk are no longer written in single blocks on the disk because there aren’t enough big empty spaces to use. Instead, the files are broken up into pieces to be stored in any area they’ll fit – in other words, they’re fragmented. Fragmented files take longer to read and load than files that are not fragmented. The Defragment tool moves the files on your disk so they’re optimised for faster reading.

To analyse your disk to see if it will benefit from defragmenting, log in using an ID that has system administrator privileges and choose Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Select the drive to analyse – typically this will be your C drive – and click Analyze to start the process. When it is complete, click View Report to read the results. If defragmentation is recommended, close all open programs and click Defragment. You can watch the results in the window – the red lines are fragmented files, so you want them to disappear. Defragmentation of a large or messy disk can take some time, so you can do it when your computer is unattended if you like.

 

Saving Space
In future you can set up Windows to minimise the amount of space allocated to the Recycle bin and Temporary Internet files folders. To do this, first right-click the Recycle Bin on the desktop, choose Properties>Global tab and adjust the size of the bin. The size is configured relative to the disk size so, if you have a large disk, use a smaller percentage value to reduce its real size. While you have this dialog open, click the System Restore tab and configure the amount of space that this utility can use. System Restore files can be quite large and they’re only really useful in terms of recovering from problems with Windows. So, you can reduce the amount of space they consume and still have restore points available if you need them. To configure the storage allocation for Temporary Internet files, open Internet Explorer and choose Tools>Internet Options>General tab and, under the Browsing History area, choose Settings. Set the amount of space allocated to these files – if you’re using a dialup connection, set this to a larger value (based on the recommended values shown in the dialog) – this speeds up browsing when you revisit pages regularly. Avoid, however, making this setting too large – if you store too many files your computer will take longer to search through them, so too high a setting is as bad as a too low. If you’re using a broadband connection you won’t notice much difference when browsing if you don’t have a lot of files cached, so reduce the amount of space to reclaim disk space.

 

More Memory
One typical problem you’ll encounter when running lots of programs is insufficient memory, which will slow everything down. The reason is that, when you launch a program, it is read from the hard disk and loaded into memory. So, even if you have plenty of hard disk space, your programs can still run slowly because there’s not enough memory for them. Most computers are sold with less memory than you’ll ideally need because memory is expensive and most manufacturers aren’t generous in what they supply. If you run multiple programs at a time, such as an email program, an IM application, Web browser and a couple more, you’ll benefit from adding more memory up to the maximum your computer can take.

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Timesaving Tips
Some of the things that cause your computer to run slow might not be immediately obvious to you. For example, you can speed up the time it takes to render screen graphics by reducing their complexity. If you don’t use high-end graphics programs like Photoshop and if you’re not working with photos, then you can make do with a lesser colour depth on your monitor as a trade-off for a faster computer. To do this, rightclick an empty place on the desktop and choose Properties>Settings tab and decrease the Color Quality setting to Medium (16 Bit). Another option that will improve speed is disabling animation and visual effects. To do this, right-click My Computer and choose Properties>Advanced tab>Performance Settings button. Select either Adjust for best performance, or configure the Custom options to disable features you don’t need, to get better performance.

The Windows desktop picture and too many icons can also slow down your computer. If you don’t need a desktop picture, remove it by rightclicking an empty place on the desktop. Choose Properties>Desktop tab and select the None option. Select a colour for the desktop, if desired, then click Apply.

Desktop icons take time to display and you can speed up your computer by removing unwanted icons. Right-click the desktop, choose Properties>Desktop tab and click Customize Desktop>Clean Desktop Now. This wizard moves unused desktop icons to a folder so they no longer consume resources. You can set the Desktop Cleanup Wizard to run at regular intervals from the Desktop tab, so you’ll be prompted to clean up your unused desktop items regularly. Alternatively if you want your icons available but don’t need them to always be visible, hide them by rightclicking the desktop, then choose Arrange Icons By>Hide Desktop Icons. They’ll remain hidden from view until you choose to view them again by choosing Arrange Icons By>Show Desktop Icons. If you share your computer with others and if their accounts are open when you are using the computer, it will run more slowly than usual. If you can’t switch to their user ID and close them down, you can Log them off by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete to open the Windows Task Manager. Click the Users tab, select the user to remove and click Log Off to log them off and shut down the applications they are using. This frees up the computer’s memory and processes for your applications. In a similar vein, if you leave your computer on most of the time, you can speed it up by simply restarting it. The reason is that as you open and close programs, not all of them give back all the memory they’ve been using so, over time, you have less memory available (there’s even a term for it - it’s called memory leakage). Restarting your computer refreshes your memory so there’s more available for use.

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Startup and Shutdown
Two occasions when most computers appear to run slow are at startup and shutdown, and you can speed up both. To improve startup, remove programs that you don’t use from the Startup list so they don’t load. You’ll find some startup programs in your Startup folder, and to find these, right-click the Start button and choose Open Programs>Startup. Remove any programs you don’t want to start automatically. To locate programs that are set to launch for all users, right-click the Start menu, choose Open All Users>Programs> Startup folder and do the same thing. Now the programs won’t launch automatically but you can launch them, if needed, from the All Programs menu.

Some programs that load at startup are hidden from view. To find these, choose Start>Run, type msconfig in the Open dialog and click OK. Click the Startup tab in the System Configuration Utility dialog to all the programs that Windows launches at startup. Any of those that you recognise and that you don’t use, can be stopped from loading by disabling their checkbox in the Startup item list. When you’re done, click Apply and then Close. The changes will take effect next time you start your computer. In addition to speeding up the time that it takes to start your computer, you can also speed up the time it takes to close down. For example, Windows waits a long time for stopped programs to shut down before it kills them. You can speed up the process with some registry edits.

If you’re unfamiliar with editing the registry, begin by backing it up so you have a copy if anything goes wrong. Also be aware that the registry is critical to your computer performing correctly, so don’t change anything you don’t understand. To back up the registry, choose Start>Run, type regedit into the Open dialog and click OK. Choose File>Export, and select All from the Export range area. Type a filename for the registry file and click Save.

These are the keys and values to adjust to speed up the shutdown process:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\ Desktop
• HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\ Desktop For both these keys, change the WaitToKillAppTimeout value from 20000 to 1000 and change the HungAppTimeout value to 1000
• KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ CurrentControlSet\Control For this key, set the WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 1000
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\ Desktop

For this key, set the AutoEndTasks value to 1 To locate a key, in the Registry editor, navigate through the tree view on the left to the particular entry then right-click it and choose Modify. Confirm the Value name is correct and change the value data to the recommended value. Then navigate to the next key and, when you’re done, choose File>Exit. In each case, you’re changing the time delay from 20000 milliseconds (20 seconds) to 1000 milliseconds (one second). In the final case you’re forcing Windows to close unresponsive programs rather than wait for you to press the OK button to allow this.

 

Get help
In addition to using Windows’ own tools, there are lots of handy programs you can use to optimise your system. One of these is the Ashampoo WinOptimizer Suite Platinum 3.3. You can download a trial of version it from the AShampoo Web site: www.ashampoo.com The program is 11.5Mb in size and you can trial it for up to 40 days. Once installed, launch the program and browse its tools. These include cleaning, tuning and tweaking tools, all of which assist you in maintaining your Windows computer in an optimal state. If you’re unsure where to start, enable Easy Mode and use the 1-Click Optimization feature. This automatically runs the Drive Cleaner, Registry Cleaner and Internet Cleaner.

The program’s cleaning tools include tools not available in Windows, such as a tool to locate and remove duplicate files and Windows registry entries. The tweaking tools provide one-stop access to tools for optimising Windows, such as the program’s own defragmentation tool and Windows configuration dialogs.

If you’re serious about keeping your computer running well and if you’d prefer to do this from a single program with a simple interface, then something like WinOptimizer is a good investment. If you’re new to optimisation, take note of the program’s warnings and recommendations and only remove files it suggests are safe to remove.