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Speed Up Your PC (Part 2)

By Mohammad Yousef | July 2004

[Back to Part 1]

Upgrade your hardware: running new software on old hardware causes your system to significantly decelerate. The solution? Either upgrade your hardware or switch back to older versions of the software.

Clean up your registry: the registry is a main part of your OS. In time, as you use Windows, install and uninstall programs, your registry can get clogged up, therefore slowing down your computer. Registry cleaners galore, but if you want (and I’m sure you do want) reliable freeware to do the job, I recommend Microsoft’s RegClean and Lexun Freeware’s RegScrubXP. Both are easy to use and automatically back up your registry before doing any changes. However, I feel obliged to warn you that cleaning up your registry might do more harm than good.

Empty the Prefetch folder: An overloaded Prefetch folder might be the reason behind performance deterioration. So, you can go to “C:\Windows\Prefetch” and delete all the .pf files. Be careful not to delete other files, only delete the .pf files.

Disable unnecessary apps: Perhaps too many active processes are reducing your computer’s speed. To disable some of them click “Start”, click “Run”, type “msconfig” without quotes, click OK, go to the “Startup” tab and uncheck any unnecessary application.

Disable unnecessary services: Windows uses several processes called services. Some of these services are set to automatically load on startup or whenever Windows feels like. You might be surprised to know though, that you can disable most services because, depending on how you use your PC, you might not even need them. Visit this useful page to know which Windows XP services are safe to disable and which are not.