Top 20 Tips To Keep Your System Faster

Follow these tips and you will definitely have a much faster and more reliable
PC! Most of the below tips works for windows XP.

1. Wallpapers: They
slow your whole system down, so if you're willing to compromise, have a basic
plain one instead!

2. Drivers: Update your hardware drivers as
frequently as possible. New drivers tend to increase system speed especially in
the case of graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very
frequently!

3. Minimizing: If you want to use several programs at the
same time then minimize those you are not using. This helps reduce the overload
on RAM.

4. Boot Faster: The 'starting Windows 95/98' message on startup
can delay your booting for a couple of seconds. To get rid of this message go to
c: and find the file Msdos.sys. Remove the Read-Only option. Next, open it in
Notepad or any other text editor. Finally, go to the text 'Options' within the
file and make the following changes: Add BootDelay=0. To make your booting even
faster, set add Logo=0 to remove the Windows logo at startup.

5. Restart
only Windows: When restarting your PC, hold down Shift to only restart Windows
rather than the whole system which will only take a fraction of the time.

6. Turn Off Animations: Go to Display Settings from the Control Panel
and switch to the Effects Tab. Now turn off Show Windows Content While Dragging
and Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts. This tip is also helpful with Windows XP
because of the various fade/scroll effects.

7. Faster Start-Menu Access:
Go to the Start menu and select Run. Now type Regedit and hit Enter. The
Registry Editor will appear on the screen. Now, open the folder HKEY_CURRENT_
USERControl PanelDesktop. You should see a MenuShowDelay value. If you don't
then do the following: right click on a blank space in the right pane and select
NewString. Change the name in the new value to MenuShowDelay. Now that we have
the MenuShowDelay value, double click on it and enter 0 in the value data field.
This sets the start menu delay to 0 milliseconds.

8. Resolutions: If you
are willing to do anything for faster performance from your PC, then try
lowering your display resolution. The lower it is, the faster your PC.

9. Turn off Active Desktop: Go to your Display Properties and switch to
the Web tab. Uncheck View My Active Desktop As a Web Page. Since the Active
Desktop option under Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources, this option can
have a dramatic effect on the speed of the whole system.

10. Defragment
Often: Windows 98's Defrag tool uses Application Acceleration from Intel which
means that when you defragment your drive, data is physically arranged on the
drive so that applications will load faster.

11. Take your PC to
Bed: Using the Advanced Power Management feature under Windows 98 gives you the
option to use the sleep command. That way, you can send your PC to sleep instead
of shutting it down and then restarting it. It's as simple as pressing a button
and then pressing the same button to wake it up. You can tell Windows after how
many minutes/hours of inactivity to automatically sleep the machine in the
Advanced Power Management section of the Control Panel.

12. Faster
Internet Access: If you use the Internet for reference and the sites you visit
are rarely updated then try the following. In IE (the same can be done in
Netscape) go to Tools, Internet Options. Next, click on Settings... In the
Temporary Internet Files section. Finally, select Never for the first option and
double the amount of storage space to use, click OK!

13. Benchmarking:
Benchmarking can be very useful when run frequently. It can tell you how your
PC's components are performing and then compare them to other machines like
yours. For example, when you overclock your PC, you want to know how much more
speed you have and whether it is stable. All this and more can be discovered
using benchmarking. An excellent piece of software for doing this job is SiSoft
Sandra which can be found in the Downloads File Archive!

14. Refresh the
Taskbar without restarting: If you in some way change the taskbar, either in
Regedit or elsewhere, you can refresh the task bar without restarting. Hold down
Ctrl Alt Del, and double click on Explorer. Say Yes to close Explorer, but no to
closing Windows. This will refresh the Taskbar and system tray.

15.
Quick CD Eject: Instead of pushing the button on your drive, right-click your CD
drive letter in My Computer and click on Eject. This will also remove any icons
that have become associated with the CD drive.

16. Start Up Programs:
Windows can be slowed down when programs run on start up. To eliminate this,
check your Start up folder. You can access it from the start menu: Start,
Programs, Start Up. Another way to eliminate programs from loading even before
Windows actually starts is by doing the following: Click on Start, then Run.
Type msconfig. It will take quite a long time for this program to load, but when
you finally see it on your screen, explore the different tabs. They all have to
do with how quickly your PC boots, so select what you want, and uncheck what you
don't want!

17. Fonts: When Windows starts, it loads every single font
in the Fonts folder. Therefore, the more fonts you have, the slower the booting
process. To get rid of unwanted fonts, simply go to the Fonts folder under
c:windows and remove whatever you don't want. Fonts that have a red letter 'A'
as their icon are system fonts, so don't delete them.

18. Stretching
Wallpapers: Don't "stretch" your wallpaper in Windows 98 since it actually slows
Windows down when you drag icons around on the desktop.

19. RAM Matters:
If you have less than 32MB then you should seriously think of upgrading it to at
least 64MB. Windows runs much more smoothly with 64MB or higher and tends to use
less hard disk space for virtual memory.

20. Partitioning: A very nice
little thing you can do to boost system performance. By partitioning your hard
drive, splitting one physical drive into several logical ones, you can gain
several advantages.
1. If you get a virus or you accidentally format a
drive, not all will be lost.
2. By placing the swap file (Win386.swp) on a
separate drive, The swap file will be less fragmented and thus, faster.
3.
Place Windows on a separate drive and whenever you need to reinstall it, you
rest assured that your data is safe on a separate drive. Partitioning can be
done using a few programs such as FDisk which comes with DOS. However, FDisk
formats everything on the hard disk before partitioning. Alternatively, you can
use Partition Magic from Power Quest to partition your hard disk without losing
your data.