How To Speed Up Your Windows Computer

The following are a few steps you can take to improve the overall performance of your computer and get the most out of it. These steps work for both Windows Vista and XP, but the instructions here were tested on Vista so it might be slightly different for XP.

For a start, you can automate the removal of temporary files from your computer (detailed instructions in my other post).

Right click on your task bar and select Task Manager. Move to the processes tab and at the bottom it will tell you how many processes you have running. If the number of processes is 50 or greater, there is probably room for improvement. In the Run... box, type in services.msc and navigate to either Black Viper's Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Services Configuration or Windows XP x86 (32-bit) Service Pack 3 Services Configuration. This website will give you a comprehensive list of all Windows services and which ones you can disable to improve system performance. I managed to get my old Windows XP desktop computer down to about 20 processes, though it's still showing its age when compared with newer computers. If you are using a laptop however, there are more essential services such as wireless, and so on. You can probably safely get your computer down to around 30-40 processes. Anything less than that is just icing on the cake.

Right click on Computer and select Properties. Then click Advanced System Settings on the left. Click the Advanced tab. Click on Settings... under Performance. Under the Advanced tab, make sure you have Virtual Memory enabled. It's safe enough to let Windows manage your page file size, but some prefer to manage it themselves. Under the Visual Effects tab, select Adjust for Best Performance, then re-select the following visual effects for a "still-pleasant" Aero experience, without taking too hard of a hit on the resources. I could list them all but it's easier this way: Select the bottom three, skip one, select two, skip one, select three, then select Show preview and filters in folders and Enable desktop composition. Vista should still look decent after this, and free up a few resources at the same time. Select OK to get back to the System Properties window. While you are here, click Settings under Startup and Recovery. Make sure Automatically Restart is unchecked under System Failure. That way if your system fails, you have time to read the error message before rebooting the system, which makes problem solving a whole lot easier.

Lastly, if you are running an older system with an IDE hard drive (anything pre-2003) it wouldn't hurt to check this article about slow IDE drives.

There are many more tweaks you can make to your system, and if I think of any more, I will add them here. This should get you on a good start though. If you don't feel like going through Black Viper's list of services (it can take a long time), feel free to just use msconfig to turn off startup programs and services. It's not as extensive, but it takes a lot less time to configure. If you turn off something essential, just reboot or boot into safe mode (F8 at POST) if necessary and fix what you broke. Take your time disabling services you aren't sure about, and everything should be fine. Be sure to defragment your hard drive every so often too.

Barring all these tweaks, if your system is still slow, buy more RAM or better yet, buy a new computer.