Date:06/03/2006 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/ew/2006/03/06/stories/2006030600190300.htm
Back Boosting system performance

My system configuration is AMD Sempron, with 1.5 ghz, 40 gb,128 MB RAM, with Win XP and 2000 as the operating systems. I have installed sp4 in the Win 2000 OS. The system is slow in Win 2000.

Primros

Please take the following steps to improve system performance: First free up disk space by deleting the unwanted files. Windows has built-in Disk Cleanup tool. To bring this up, click Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup. Select the drive and click ok. You can use one of the good freeware tools, CCleaner (Size 1.25MB) available at http://www.filehippo.com/

download_ccleaner/.

Once a week you can clear your unwanted files. Disk Defragmenter is a tool designed to reorganise the data on your hard drive so that your computer runs more efficiently. Click Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Defragmenter. Perform the Disk Defragmenter at least once a month as good preventive maintenance. The hard disk performance may be slowed down by bad sectors. The Error Checking utility scans the hard drive for bad sectors, and scans for file system errors to see whether certain files or folders are misplaced. To access this, please Open My Computer and right-click the hard disk you want to search for bad sectors and then click Properties. Click Tools tab and "Check Now" button. In the Check Disk dialog box, please select the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" check box, and then click start. If bad sectors are found, choose to fix them. Only select the "Automatically fix file system errors" check box if you think that your disk contains bad sectors. Spyware can hamper your computer's performance. Install one of the Anti-spyware tools such as AdAware, http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10045910.html or SpyBot Search & Destroy http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2471.html and make sure your system is free from spywares. If your PC has less than 512 MB of RAM, add more memory. You have mentioned 128 MB RAM installed on your system. Adding more memory is advisable. The indexing service is one of the features of windows. This extracts information from documents and other files on the hard drive and creates a "searchable keyword index.". You may turn off this feature constantly working in the background. For this, open control panel - Add/Remove Programs - click Add/Remove Windows Components and then uncheck "Indexing Service" and click Next - Finish.

Empty the Windows Prefetch folder every three months or so in Windows XP. Navigate to "c:\windows\prefetch" and delete all .PF files that are older than a week or two. This may boot your system fast. Remove any unnecessary programs or items from Windows Startup routine using the MSCONFIG utility. To do this, please click Start - Run, type MSCONFIG, and click OK. Click the Startup tab, then uncheck any items you don't want to start when Windows starts. For Windows 2000, the msconfig utility is available at http://www.techadvice.com/

win2000/m/msconfig_w2k.htm

Disable unnecessary services. Windows XP loads a lot of services that the customer most likely does not need. To access this, please click Start - Run - type "services.msc". To determine which services you can disable, please visit http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12 for Windows XP configurations.

By reducing the visual effects, we can boost the system performance in Windows XP. To do this, open Control Panel - System - Advanced tab - In the Performance tab click Settings choose the Visual Effects tab. Enable (check) the option "Adjust for best Performance". Also remove the desktop wallpaper.

To speed up Folder browsing in Windows XP, just disable the following setting. Open My Computer - Click Tools menu - Folder Options - View tab - Uncheck (disable) the "Automatically search for network folders and Printers" check box. Next optimise your paging filesize. Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5 times the amount of actual physical memory by default. This is good for systems with smaller amounts of memory (under 512 MB). If you have less than 512 MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have 512 MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size. Windows XP includes a system restore utility that is capable of rolling your computer back to a pre-defined point in time, removing all changes made to the system since that point. This can be an extremely useful feature for rescuing your PC from viruses or faulty software problems, but it also eats up a large amount of hard drive space. By default, system restore reserves 12 per cent of each logical drive for itself. You may reduce this to 5per cent. To adjust system restore settings, please Right click on My Computer - properties - System Restore tab. To improve the shutdown times, a simple registry change can force Windows XP to clear the paging file each time it shuts down. To access this, please Click Start - Run - type "regedit" and click ok. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\

CurrentControlSet\Control\

Session Manager\Memory Management.

On the right side, right click on "ClearPageFileAtShutdown", select Modify and make value of "1", and Exit from Registry Editor and restart your Computer. If you do not use hibernation, make sure you do not have it enabled. This reserves disk space equal to your system RAM. To disable this, please open Control Panel - Power Option - Select Hibernate tab - uncheck the "Enable hibernation" check box. <15,3m,0m>TuneXP (Size 1 MB) is one of the best performance tuner freeware tools for Windows XP, downloaded from http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/showdoc.php?doc=txp_download. Please read the documentation before configuring TuneXP.

Please refer the following links:

http://www.techbuilder.org/recipes/59201471

http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/12/3/1433325.html

Solution by M. Sampath

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