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TIPS AND TRICKS:WINDOWS XP
Posted Date: 22 Mar 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Computer & Technology
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Posted By: arunkumar Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 5
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Change the theme
The default Windows XP
theme looks very pretty, but
hogs a lot of system resources
for the eye-candy effects such
as bevelled objects and transitions.
If looks are not important
to you, switch over to the
classic Windows look. To do
this, right-click an empty area
of the desktop and click Properties.
Under the Themes tab,
set Windows Classic as the
current theme and click OK.
Turn off display effects
Switching off transition and
animation effects can save a
lot of system resources. These
effects are not required to run
programs and cause an
unnecessary load on the
processor and RAM. Rightclick
on an empty area of the
desktop, click Properties and
switch to the Appearance tab.
Click Effects and clear all the
checkboxes.
Choose performance
Windows XP has some very
good features to maximise
performance. Unfortunately,
the default settings are no
good. You can choose to have
it optimise itself for faster
computing. To change these
settings, click Start, rightclick
My Computer and click
Properties. Switch to the
Advanced tab and click the
Settings button under Performance.
By default, ‘Let Windows
choose what’s best for
my computer’ is selected.
Choose ‘Adjust for best performance’
instead, and you
will almost immediatelyoptionally choose each type
of effect that should be
enabled from here, but if it’s
power you are looking for,
leave them all off. Note that
the behaviour and appearance
of a lot of Windows such
as the Control Panel, will
become quite different. If you
prefer the helpful wizard-like
interfaces, you may want to
sacrifice a bit on performance
and enable the option to ‘Use
common tasks in folders’.
Paging options
On the Performance Options
dialog (right-click My Computer
and click Properties >
Advanced > Settings), click on
the Advanced tab to access
even more performance features.
You can adjust the
processor and memory
options, but for desktop PCs
you should leave the default
options (optimise for Programs).
What you should
change are the virtual memory
settings. You can have one
swap file per drive (Check the
tip ‘Optimise virtual memory’ in
the Windows 98 section for
more on swap files). Set the
optimum size and click OK.
Boot options
If you are not booting multiple
operating systems, you can
turn off the option permanently,
until it is required. If
there is another OS on your
system, say Windows 98, you
can reduce the amount of time
the option to choose which
OS to load is displayed. Rightclick
My Computer, click Properties
> Advanced and click the
Settings button under Startup
and Recovery. Here, you can
choose which operating system
to boot by default. You
can uncheck the boxes to
show the boot options, or
select the number of seconds
for which the choices are displayed.
Five seconds is usually
more than enough.
You will notice recovery
settings in case of a system failure.
Alerts and debugging
information will not be very
helpful for most users, so you
can turn these options off too.
Turn off services
Depending on your computer’s
configuration and options
chosen when installing Windows
XP, it will have certain
services enabled. Many of
these you may never require
and can safely switch off. You
can disable a service so that it
never runs, or set it to be
manually started.
Right-click My Computer
and click Manage to bring up
the Computer Management
console. On the left pane,
select Services under Services
and Applications to control all
installed services. The easiest
way to filter through the list is
to sort it by the Status column.
Services that are ‘Started’ are
the ones you need to look at.
(Read more on services in the tip
‘Get rid of services’ under Windows
2000 Professional’.)
Quit indexing
The Indexing Service stores
information from documents
and organises it for faster
searches. This is not useful to
many users, especially if the
documents are well organised.
Not only does this service take
up system resources, it also
involves frequent read/write
operations to the hard disk,
which are particularly slow.
From the Computer Management
console (right-click My
Computer and click Manage),
select Indexing Service from
the left pane under Services
and Applications. You will see
the list of catalogues on the
right pane. If any of them are
started, you can stop them
from here, and even delete the
catalogue. Optionally, you can
expand the tree on the left
pane for each indexed item
and restrict the folders it scans.
Tweak UI for XP
Tweak UI is available for Windows
XP too. It gives you
access to quite a few system
settings that are otherwise not
readily available, and can help
gain that extra inch of power
from XP. You can download
this version from www.
microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/
downloads/powertoys.asp.
Under General, you can
turn off display effects such as
fading and animations.
Under Explorer, uncheck the
boxes for ‘Allow Web content
to be added to the desktop’
and ‘Enable smooth scrolling’.
Expand the Explorer
tree, select Thumbnails and
move the Image Quality slider
to around the centre. Next,
expand the My Computer >
AutoPlay branch. Under Drives,
you can disable AutoPlay
for all drives, thus reducing
this overhead. Under the
Types branch, you can choose
to disable AutoPlay for CD,
DVD and removable drives.
Under the Command
Prompt branch, you can configure
special keys to automatically
complete file and
directory names, as on a Unix
system. If you have a singleuser
system, you can have XP
logon automatically from
Logon > Autologon. Under
Logon > Unread Mail, you can
disable the notification of
new e-mail messages for each
user. Not only is this more
secure, but it also reduces the
overhead of polling for new
messages for every user.
notice a boost in speed. This
is because all graphic effects
are turned off. You can
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