Information Addicts

Is your PC taking longer and longer to start up, does it seem to be slower when opening and using applications?
Over time your PC can get bloated with applications and programs you no longer use, old drivers your pc doesn’t need, files and folders that get scattered all over your hard drive. All of this makes your pc work harder and eventually slows it down.
In this article I am going to show you 5 quick and easy steps to speed up your start up and boost the performance of your system.

1. Set the boot order. When you switch on your pc it can start (or boot up) from the hard drive, floppy drive, CD or DVD drive, flash memory, or even an external drive. To have the pc start up in the fastest possible time make sure it starts up from the hard drive. If it is not set for the hard drive first, the pc will try each device until it comes to one with an Operating System or boot up files installed on it, before it will even start up.
You can check this by going into the BIOS set up utility (BIOS stands for Basic input/output system), when you switch on the pc press the F1 or Delete key, (some laptops use F2) to take you to the BIOS settings.
Look for a menu that reads ‘Boot’ or ‘Boot device’, use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move around, click enter to go into the submenu. When you see ‘Boot device order or Boot device priority’ set it so the hard drive is the first in the list. Press F10 or Save and exit the BIOS.

If you are in any doubt and you have a motherboard manual then take a look at it.

2. Empty your Startup folder. Press Start > All Programs > Startup and take a look which programs are in this folder. The more programs that are listed here, the longer it takes your pc to start, as it will automatically load these with Windows first.
Clearing items in here will speed up your start up, however if you are not sure which ones to get rid of, drag them to your desktop to create an icon. If you find that you need one of them to run a program, just double click the icon, and if you don’t need it then you can eventually delete the icon, these are just shortcuts to programs or services so don’t worry about deleting them.

3. Uninstall old drivers and devices. When hardware is removed, very rarely do you remove the drivers that come with it. What can then happen are that these old drivers are still loaded in Windows which can slow down the start up.
To get rid of unwanted drivers or even a device that is no longer used:
1) Open the “Start” menu and choose “Run.”
2) Type in “cmd” (without the quotes) and click “ok”.
3) At the cmd prompt, type in “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1″ (without the quotes) and press enter. (Note that nothing seems to happen–this is ok. We are actually setting an environment variable which is going to help us to see hidden devices)
4) Then type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter. This will launch the Windows Device Manager Console.
5) In the Device Manager Console, from the “View” menu, select “Show Hidden Devices”.
Now, as you expand the different drivers and devices in device manager you will see not only the items that Windows currently detects as installed on your pc (these are the usual items displayed), but you will also see drivers, and devices which have been loaded in the past but were not uninstalled. You can find your offending device, right-click, and choose “uninstall” to remove it from the system completely.
I recommend that you only uninstall any driver or device that you are 100% sure you don’t need or use anymore.
Note, I highly recommend that you back up your PC before you do any uninstalling, or you could even set a System Restore point first.

If you accidentally exit the Device Manager Console you will need to start over again at the cmd prompt. To close the cmd prompt window, type “exit” (without the quotes).
The above steps are taken from the techrecipes website however I have added and changed some of the text.
Check Printers and Faxes, click Start > Control panel and double click the Printers and Faxes options in Classic View. If you see an item you no longer use right click it and choose delete. Use the Add or Remove programs in the control panel to remove any software that is associated with it.

4. Services you can do without. Services are basically programs that run in the background and use up system resources. You don’t need all of them running and disabling those you don’t need will speed up your pc.
Click Start > Run, type services.msc and you will see a list of Services that are running on your PC.

 

You will see that a lot of them are set to Automatic, but you can set the below Services to either Manual or if you are confident – Disabled. Right click them, select properties and then set the ‘Startup type’ to which ever one you prefer. If you find that you have problems in Windows afterwards all you have to do is set them back to Automatic.
Services you can set to either Manual or disabled are as follows:
Alerter, if you’re not monitoring a network server, this is normally set to disabled but worth checking.
Computer Browser, if your pc is not on a network, disable it.
Distributed Link Tracking Client, this is for if you are on a standalone computer or small home network.
Error Reporting Service, set this one to disabled and it stops you receiving those nuisance ‘sending error messages to Microsoft’ reports after a program crashes.
Help and Support, this one can be set to disabled and if you need to use it, it will set itself back to Automatic.
IPSEC Services, change this if you don’t use VPN (Virtual Private Network) or your pc is not on a network with a domain.
Net Logon, used for logging into a Windows domain. This is not required in a typical home network, and you can disable this one.
Remote Registry, if you are not a remote user this can be changed.
Webclient, allows FTP-like access to hosted folders and data on websites. not really necessary as far as I know. Disable unless a Microsoft product complains then enable it.
Windows Time, automatically synchronizes your computer’s clock with a Microsoft time server at weekly intervals. If you don’t find this useful then it can be disabled.
Wireless Zero Configuration, used if you have any wireless devices attached to your pc.

5. Defrag your hard drive. Files needed to run Windows eventually get scattered all over the hard drive and every time Windows need to access one of these files it has to search for it, the more scattered they are the slower your pc becomes.
Defragging the hard drive organises these files for faster access. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter and then click on the C: drive and then click on the Defragment button.

There are many other speed tips for XP, which ones do you use?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under PC Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.