Slimming for your Windows XP

Today's hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper, but the volume of software is growing faster, and there are still a lot of people still using 20GB and smaller hard drives. How to meet the requirements of the software to the hard disk? Start by playing again on a bloated Windows operating system.

All of the following are examples of SP1 installed in Simplified Chinese version of Windows XP, most of which are for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and some operations may affect the stability of the operating system and be noted when used.

The first part:

After installing the operating system, you need to do the following first. Fortunately, the following methods, as long as the operation of no errors, and will not have a stable operation of the system has too much impact, so you can be assured to try.

1. Disabling System Restore: System Restore can be used to back up the system in peacetime and revert to a previous backup state after a problem has occurred. Although this function is more practical, but to occupy a large amount of hard disk space, usually each hard disk partition 12% of the free space will be used to save the restore point. If you do not need this feature, you can disable it.

Click the right mouse button on the "My Computer" icon and select Properties to open the System Properties dialog box. Then open the System Restore tab, select the check box to turn off System Restore on all drives, and determine.

2. Transfer paging file: The paging file is the virtual memory we were exposed to in Windows 98 before. By default, the paging file is placed in the root directory of the system disk. To save system disk space, we can transfer the paging file to other partitions, and if you have more physical memory (for example, more than 512MB), you can also set the maximum size of the paging file smaller.

Open the Advanced tab of the System properties, click the Performance Settings button, and then open the Advanced tab in a new pop-up window, click the Change button, and then reassign the location of the paging file in the Virtual Memory dialog box. Remember to click the "Settings" button next to the location you specified, and to change the system disk's initial and maximum settings to 0 (figure I).

3. Temporary folder: Many software in the use process will generate temporary files, these files will be saved in the system disk in the temporary folder, the software is closed when the automatic removal. However, some software because of the design or abnormal exit, may not be able to completely empty the temporary files, as time passes the temporary folder will occupy a lot of hard disk space. Moving them out of the system disk is also easier to manage.

Also on the Advanced tab of the System Properties dialog box, click on the "Environment variables" button, and then in the window of figure two to give "TEMP" and "TMP" two variables to specify the location, you need to note that environment variables are divided into the current user's environment variables and system variables, respectively, to do the same settings. Select each variable and click "Edit" to reassign the variable value (the variable value here refers to the new path, such as D:\temp). The new temporary folder settings will take effect after you restart the system.