23 Practical Tips for Windows XP

Often we use defragmentation to make Windows run faster. But now the 7200-turn drives sold on the market have improved both in search and transmission, and many models come with a 8m cache, and the NTFS file system used by WinXP is more efficient than the FAT system. As a result, defragmentation has been very limited in its role in improving computer performance. Here are 23 practical tips to improve your computer's performance, make WinXP run faster and more reliably, and hope to help you:

1 in the system to install ultra-133 hard disk acceleration expansion card or with 8m cache ATA hard drive, can effectively reduce the system startup time.

2) to increase the memory to more than 512m.

3 Determine that Windows XP is using the NTFS file system. Check the method: Double-click My Computer, on the C: disk, right-click the mouse, select Properties, check the file system type. If it is FAT32, convert it to NTFS by first backing up all the important data, then selecting the Run from the Start menu, and then confirming it after entering CMD. At the prompt, enter convert c:/fs:ntfs and carriage return. In this process, it is best not to interrupt in midstream, and to ensure that there is no virus in the system.

4 Turn off the file indexing function. The Windows Indexing Service extracts information from a large number of files on your hard disk and creates a keyword index, which speeds up searching for information from these files if you have thousands of files on your hard disk. But it takes a lot of time for Windows to create this index, and most people never use this feature. The way to do this is to double-click My Computer, right-click on the hard disk and the subfolders below, select Properties, and deselect the index to quickly find the file. If a warning or error message appears (such as Access denied), click Ignore.

5 Upgrade the motherboard and graphics driver, upgrade the BIOS.

6 every three months to clear windows of the pre-read folder (Windowsprefetch) once. Windows stores frequently used data in a pre-read folder, which can greatly speed up reading when it needs to be reused. But for a long time, this folder will have a lot of garbage data no longer in use, but increased windows read time, affecting system performance.

7 Run a Disk cleanup every month to remove temporary and unwanted files. Method: Double click on My Computer, on the C: disk, right-click the mouse, select Properties, click the Disk Cleanup button.

8 in the device administrator, double-click the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller to set the transfer mode of all connected devices to use DMA (if available) in the Primary/secondary IDE channel.

9 update wiring. After using a new hard drive, you should also have 80-line ultra-133 cables for all IDE devices. If only one hard drive is installed, the hard drive should install the top of the line cable, and do not install the interface in the middle of the cable, otherwise there may be an abnormal signal. For Ultra DMA hard drives, these abnormal signals can affect the best performance of the drive.

10 Clear All Spyware (Spy program). There are a lot of free software, such as AdAware, that can accomplish this task. Once cleared, the software that contains spyware will not work properly, and if you do need one of those software, reinstall it again.

11 Remove unnecessary programs from the Startup group. Methods: Select the Run from the Start menu, enter Msconfig, enter the Startup tab, and cancel the items that you do not want to load at system startup. For items that are not identified, check out the WinTasks process library, which contains a description of known system processes, applications, and spyware. It can also be found in web search engines such as Google.

12 Enter the Add/Remove Programs in the control Panel to remove unnecessary and unwanted programs.

13 Close all unnecessary animations and active desktops. Methods: Click on the System icon in the Control Panel, go to the Advanced tab, set the performance, on the Visual Effects tab, select the Custom Radio box to set the user interface feature to disabled.