Try these things out to make your computer work faster. The following are some of the ways to improve the performance of your Windows computer:
1. Disable unneeded Windows services (Search Google with these keywords. I couldn't detail due to length.)
2. Free up Disk Space
3. Disable some startup items in MSConfig
Run the command msconfig and click the “startup” tab.
Uncheck any items that you don’t need at startup. Some apps run their services, which enable them to start fast (like MSOffice, Acrobat Reader, etc). Expand the heading named ‘Command‘ so that you can see what command is being executed for each startup item. To expand the Command heading, hover the cursor near the right end of the Command column. When the cursor becomes a double arrow, double click with the left mouse button to expand it.
This will help you understand which items are not needed at startup.
4. Remove some items from the Windows Startup group
Check the startup folder under Start -> All Programs. Remove any items that are not needed or not used often. They are just taking up system memory, because they are running all the time in the background. You can run these programs as and when needed. You can right click each item in Startup and then click delete.
5. Clean up your Registry
Clean up your registry regularly. Use a free program like ccleaner. It also has an option to optimize (compress) the registry, but NT Registry Optimizer is better at compressing and optimizing the registry. You may also download and use the Emergency Recovery Utility from the NT Registry Optimizer page, for backing up your registry regularly and automatically, from the NT Optimizer page.
6. Remove unneeded/unused fonts
Remove unneeded or unused fonts from the Control Panel -> Fonts. Many software applications install their own fonts in addition to the standard Windows fonts. There are too many unused fonts sitting in the fonts folder, which never get used. Each of these fonts takes valuable system memory and Windows loads all the fonts from the \Windows\Fonts folder into the RAM, when it starts.
You can safely remove many of these fonts. When in the Fonts folder, click on the View menu and click ‘Details‘. You can double-click each font to view it, before clicking delete. If you think you might need these fonts in the future, you can move the unneeded fonts to another folder on your hard drive instead of deleting them.
7. Disable DLL caching
(NOTE: Use this only if you know how to edit the Registry)
Windows Explorer caches DLLs (Dynamic-Link Libraries) in memory for some time, even after the application using them was closed. This is a waste of memory. To stop Windows XP from always caching DLL files, create a new registry key as detailed below.
Click Start and then click Run. Type regedit and press the Enter key. In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\…
Create a new sub-key named ‘AlwaysUnloadDLL‘ and set the default value to ‘1′.
This would disable Windows, caching the DLLs in memory. The change would happen only after you restart Windows.
8. Disable the Windows’ built-in zip feature
It’s common to have many zipped or compressed files in today’s computer world. Windows XP and later have a built-in zip feature, which allows you to view zip files as normal folders, from within Windows Explorer. This can take quite an amount of CPU time in uncompressing the files on the fly. So, you should disable this feature and use a program like Winzip, to open zip files. Since Windows treats zip files as folders, they are also searched, when you search for a file, making the searching extremely slow.
To disable this feature, in the Run box, type the following command and hit the Enter key:
regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
The above command, without the ” /u ” would again enable the zip feature, if it’s disabled. A reboot is required for the changes to take effect. These commands may not
9. Adjust Paging File size
In My Computer Properties page, click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory, make sure that the initial size is at least 1.5 times your computer’s physical memory (RAM). For example, if your computer has 512 MB of RAM, set the initial paging file size to 768 MB.
If you want the best performance, you can buy 2 GB or more RAM, then set the minimum paging file size to 2 MB and maximum, to 50 MB. This can dramatically improve performance.
If you are confused, don't play with the settings and let Windows manage the page file size.
10. Upgrade the RAM
The more the amount of RAM, the more the number of simultaneous applications you can run. Nowadays, 1 GB and 2 GB RAM is pretty common.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
WindowsGeek