The Complete Guide To Optimising Windows XP

Make Your Menus Load Faster

This is one of my favourite tweaks as it makes a huge difference to how fast your machine will ‘feel’. What this tweak does is remove the slight delay between clicking on a menu and XP displaying the menu.

This is the delay time before a menu is opened. You can set it to ‘0? but it can make windows really hard to use as menus will open if you just look at them – well move your mouse over them anyway. I tend to go for anywhere between 50-150 depending on my mood

• Go to Start then Run
• Type ‘Regedit’ then click ‘Ok’
• Find ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop’
• Select ‘MenuShowDelay’
• Right click and select ‘Modify’
• Reduce the number to around ‘100?

Make Programs Load Faster

This little tweak tends to work for most programs. If your program doesn’t load properly just undo the change. For any program:

• Right-click on the icon/shortcut you use to launch the program
• Select properties
• In the ‘target’ box, add ‘ /prefetch:1′ at the end of the line.
• Click ‘Ok’

Ensure XP Is Using DMA Mode

XP enables DMA for Hard-Drives and CD-Roms by default on most ATA or ATAPI (IDE) devices. However, sometimes computers switch to PIO mode which is slower for data transfer – a typical reason is because of a virus. To ensure that your machine is using DMA:

• Open ‘Device Manager’
• Double-click ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers’
• Right-click ‘Primary Channel’ and select ‘Properties’ and then ‘Advanced Settings’
• In the ‘Current Transfer Mode’ drop-down box, select ‘DMA if Available’ if the current setting is ‘PIO Only’

ADVANCED

Speed Up Boot Times I

This tweak works by creating a batch file to clear the temp and history folders everytime you shutdown so that your PC doesn’t waste time checking these folders the next time it boots. It’s quite simple to implement:

• Open Notepad and create a new file with the following entries:
  • RD /S /q ‘C:\Documents and Settings’UserName without quotes’\Local Settings\History’
  • RD /S /q ‘C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\History’
  • RD /S /q ‘D:\Temp’ <”Deletes temp folder, type in the location of your temp folder’

• Save the new as anything you like but it has to be a ‘.bat’ file e.g. fastboot.bat or deltemp.bat
• Click ‘Start’ then ‘Run’
• Type in ‘gpedit.msc’ and hit ‘ok’
• Click on ‘Computer Configuration’ then ‘Windows Settings’
• Double-click on ‘Scripts’ and then on ‘Shutdown’
• Click ‘Add’ and find the batch file that you created and then press ‘Ok’

Speed Up Boot Times II

When your PC starts it usually looks for any bootable media in any floppy or cd-rom drives you have installed before it gets around to loading the Operating System from the HDD. This can waste valuable time. To fix this we need to make some changes to the Bios.

Note: Once this change has been made, you won’t be able to boot from a floppy disc or a CD-rom. If for some strange reason you need to do this in the future, just go back into your bios, repeat the steps above and put your floppy or CD-rom back as the ‘First Device’

• To enter the bios you usually press ‘F2′ or ‘delete’ when your PC starts
• Navigate to the ‘Boot’ menu
• Select ‘Boot Sequence’
• Then either move your Hard drive to the top position or set it as the ‘First Device’5. Press the ‘Escape’ key to leave the bios. Don’t forget to save your settings before exiting

Speed Up Boot Times III

When your computer boots up it usually has to check with the network to see what IP addresses are free and then it grabs one of these. By configuring a manually assigned IP address your boot time will improve. To do this do the following:

• Click on ‘Start’ and then ‘Connect To/Show All Connections’
• Right-click your network adapter card and click ‘Properties’
• On the ‘General’ tab, select ‘TCP/IP’ in the list of services and click ‘Properties’
• In the TCP/IP properties, click ‘Use the following address’ and enter an IP address for your PC. If you are using a router this is usually 192.168.0.xx or 192.168.1.xx. If you are not sure what address you could check with your ISP or go to ‘Start/run’ and type ‘cmd’ and then ‘ipconfig/all’. This will show your current IP settings which you will need to copy
• Enter the correct details for ‘Subnet mask’, ‘Default gateway’ and ‘DNS Server’. Again if you are not sure what figures to enter use ‘ipconfig/all’ as in stage 4

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