XP Speed tips

I have to admit that I “hated” XP when it first came out because I could not find most of my programs, etc. till I discovered the first couple of tweaks that I will show you... XP (in my opinion) though is as strong as death when it comes to handling errors and doing many things at once, but it kind of reminded me of the “Ford Edsel” when I first viewed it. Though it looked great, it was ahead of the majority of users / public (me included) in function and as such its acceptance did take some time.

Come to find out though that these same few tweaks to the desktop will not only make your old windows interface will reappear (Hot Dog), it will run somewhere in the order of 30% faster (by killing all that fancy unneeded desktop overhead) and allow you to run it on a class of PC’s that you thought would never run XP… Matter of fact, I run XP Pro on a AMD K2 550 MHz machine at home that I built many years ago (yes, it is getting a little slow I have to admit) with a lot of RAM loaded, but I can sling Web Code across 2 monitors while balancing my check book, e-mail, etc. and it is not all that slow for that kind of work. Am I going to run any kind of game on it? No way, but I quit playing games on PC’s back on the old 486 machines (showing my age) so to me it is no big deal J

So how do I do so much with such an old PC you ask? Simple I first kill all that fancy desktop overhead and make a few other tweaks that will help you also… So if you have a old P2 machine laying around that has at least 500 MHz CPU, maybe a 5 GIG HD and at least 265 MEGS of RAM (the more the better though) then fire that puppy up, load XP on a clean hard drive and make these few changes and you too might be surprised just how fast (and more important stable) it can run. Oh and by the way, if you have one of those newer 2 plus GIG CPU screamer machines like I do at my office, these same tweaks will have just as much effect on its performance as it will on an older machine J

So let’s get started.

First things we need is to “unleash the hounds” and kill the majority of overhead on these PC’s. So right click (and remember that feature, “right click” has a ton of options that most people do NOT even know are present no matter what you may right click on) on MY COMPUTER and then click on properties and then on the advanced tab, then click on performance settings and as the next picture shows set for “Best Performance” and then click OK.

Now it may take a few seconds for the PC to “Clear its head” so to speak, but I am willing to bet that it is already opening and closing windows faster already J

Next step is to “kill the error reporting” every time my PC has a hick up. So as the next picture shows go back to the same advance screen (if still not on your screen) and click on the error report button at the bottom right and disable (but still let me know) when we have a error then click OK.

Next things we are going to do (Your choice, but it will run faster) is to revert back to the old windows desktop, this way we can find our stuff again J The next two pictures will show you how to do such… So go to Start / Settings / Taskbar

And then into revert it back to the classic desktop

And then you can (Optional but has a lot of nice feature there) click on the Customize button and set it as you wish. This is how I have mine set to give me all the toys I need, yet not kill any speed or (worse yet) hide things from me.

Also note that even though there are more options lower down on this screen, I do NOT have any others checked. Here again it is your choice if you do, but I will tell you that the last option can hide things from view if you are not careful J

Next thing is an option that takes up a lot of hard drive room in my opinion, and that is the default recycle bin settings. Now why would I want to reserve 10% of my drive for stuff that I am trying to hold / remove? That is a lot of wasted real estate in my opinion (1 GIG for a 10 GIG drive). So I right click once again on the recycle bin, click on properties, and drag the slider back to 1%

And then click OK.

The next thing that comes in real handy is an old program from the Old Windows 98SE CD (no joke) called “Check links” (It was located in the Resource Kit folder) and if you can’t find it let me know and I can Zip up and E-Mail a copy to you J But it was simple little program that looks for broken desktop file links that you maybe viewed long ago. Now why Microsoft (among features) left this out of XP I will never know? One thing is for sure, few things slow down a PC more than looking for something that it cannot find. This because the PC does NOT know when to quit looking for them... So what I do I drop that little program into my C:/Windows folder and then create a link to it in my system tools toolbar that looks like this…

And then run it about once a week or so to clean up those broken file links. You may be shock the first time you run it as to how many files it found AND how much quicker the desktop responds once they are all “Finally” cleared out J Just run the program (might take a while) then click select all, then finish, then click OK…

Now on a basic level (for I dare not go any further without your mouse in my hand to UNDO something that may effect your PC’s configuration) is explain about PC Wallpaper and how it can slow your PC greatly by using the wrong type of picture files…

Now if you use a JPEG file for your desktop wallpaper, your video card has to really work to open and close that file (since it is compressed) 85 times a second. The reason I say 85 times is I ALWAYS have my monitors running at 85 MHz (no slower and no faster) so that I have none of the screen flicker that causes (though many do not know such) headaches J One has to remember that your lights run at 60 MHz so to rid yourself of such flicker, you have to get the video card to run “faster” than the lights. I have found that 85 MHz is perfect for the screen is solid, YET any faster speeds the video card could slow down your performance from having to draw your screens so fast…

Now you can find that refresh speed change under your advance tab for your video controls and the fastest way to get there is (you guessed it) RIGHT CLICK on any empty section of your desktop and then click on properties. Once inside your “Desk Top” properties screen, click on settings, then click advance, and then a second window will then open.

Now at this point your options may look different than mine since I use a Matrox Video Card that has 2 monitor outputs (and yes I do use 2 monitors) but their should always be a tab named monitor and on that tab is where you can change your refresh rate to 85 MHz. Now after your make that change, you may have to “resize” your screen (most times make it larger) by using the controls on the front of your monitor to “stretch out” your screen again after the speed change, but that is pretty easy. Just make sure that you are getting what you paid for and if you have this nice big (or 2) 17 plus inch monitor on your desk, stretch it out to the edges J

Now back to the wallpaper. So JPEG files really slow down most PC’s so what I do is create a empty folder called wallpaper (your choice where you put it, I use sub folder in My Pictures) and save any file that you want to use for wallpaper as a .BMP image file instead inside that folder for fast finding.

Bitmap files by nature are uncompressed (thus larger) but the video card does not have to work as hard to make that your wallpaper. Just make sure you don’t allow those same .BMP file to go over 3 or 4 MEGS in size and you will see a noticeable difference in how much faster your program windows open and close…

Here again that is easy to change by pointing your computer to open up those files as wallpaper you created in your display properties again (just like above) and this time clicking on the “desktop” tab and click on the “browse” button till you find the wallpaper folder that houses your .BMP files that you want to use J

One last that I want to cover is how your mouse reacts when clicking. Now I hate having to chase down windows to click on. So I have the mouse do some of that work for me! Just go into the “Control Panel” and click on the mouse icon. Once there, click on the “Pointer options” tab and put a check mark on “Snap To” option

This so the mouse will move from many (though not all) boxes to the next, without having to move it by hand. I bet that setting saves me on 10 thousand plus wrist moves a year just by having that simple setting turned on J your choice though on the other mouse options….

So hopefully these changes helped! I know that they will make a noticeable speed difference on pretty much any “stable” running PC AND make a few out their even more stable by giving back the power that was robbed from them. Just make sure you run your defrag program AFTER clearing out your internet cache files from time to time (see tweaking your IE setting if you do not know how to do such), and you will have a pretty solid and fast machine.

Enjoy!

Dave