Many of us still maybe using older PCs and laptops and may have faced regular problems with the processing speed of the machine. We can follow these very basic yet effective steps to speed up our machine.
- Make sure the operating system is installed in a seperate drive where your data is not saved. If you have only a ‘C’ drive, do instruct your vendor to make multiple partitions while installing the operating system next time. Make sure the C-drive has 15GB-20GB of space. The rest of the had disk may be partitioned as per need to store data (softwares, movies, songs, etc etc)
- Minimize display memory usage by using a lower display resolution. Right click on the desktop, select properties. Select the graphics properties tab and choose a lower screen resolution. Click OK.
- Go to Start->Settings->Click Control Panel->Click System->Click Advanced tab->Performance tab->Settings. Leave only the following checked: Show shadows under menus, show shadows under mouse pointer, show translucent selection rectangle, use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop, use visual styles on windows and buttons.
- Use a registry cleaner to clean your registry. Freewares like Cleanersoft Free Registry Fix will do the job. Clean your registry once a month.
- Update your antivirus. If you don’t have any, install AVG antivirus free version and perform system checkups every alternate day or at least once a week.
- Speedup Folder Browsing. Open My Computer->Tools menu->Folder Options->View tab. Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box. Click Apply->Ok. Reboot your computer.
- Defragment your hard disks once every week, especially the C-drive. Open My computer. Rightclick on a drive->properties->Tools tab->defragment now.
- Perform disk cleanups monthly. Click start in the bottom left corner, then click run. Type “cleanmgr.exe” in the text field and enter.
- Remove unused software from the add/remove programs in the control panel.
- Remove unwanted start up programs. Click start in the bottom left corner, then click run. Type “msconfig” in the text field and enter. Go to the start up tab. Un-check any other software in the list that does not belong to the operating system (microsoft) or to the antivirus.
- Make Windows load faster. Click Start->Run->’msconfig’->enter. Click on the BOOT.INI tab at the top. Over to the right there will be a box labeled Timeout with 30 in it. Change the 30 seconds to a 10 seconds.
- As a last resort, set pagefile size. Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Advanced tab. Click the Settings button under Performance. Now switch to this Advanced tab, and click on ‘Change’ under Virtual Memory. You will see the ‘Initial Size (MB)’ and the Maximum Size (MB)’. Change ‘Initial Size’ to the same value as ‘Maximum Size’ then click set.
These few simple guidelines will help your operating system (windows) to speed up. The benefits are simply awesome for slight investments of effort on maintenance of your machine.