We received several messages thanking us for Heather’s recent piece on speeding up your PC by preventing and getting rid of Adware, among them several people mentioned Windows XP seeming slow enough on its own to them without the addition of unwanted Adware, so I thought a follow-up piece on easy methods for speeding up a PC running Windows XP would be helpful too.

#1 Stop the Indexing Service – Windows like to index every file on your system for faster searching through Explorer, however whenever I’ve talked to people about this they overwhelmingly tell me that they never (or rarely) use the search feature in Explorer, so there’s really no reason to allow Indexing to run.

It takes up memory and CPU resources in the background, as well as disk space on your hard drive–so shutting this down will give a performance boost to your normal computing use.

To turn it off simply Right click on your hard drive from within Explorer and select the Properties option. At the bottom of the informational pop-up you will see a check box labeled “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching”

Make sure that’s unchecked and press the “Apply” button. Make sure to apply the changes to all files and folders on the drive.

#2 Minimize Windows Animation Effects – Windows XP offers lots of neat animation and graphics effects, however these come at a cost to performance. If your machine is slow or sluggish you can get a boost by turning these off.

Simply Right click anywhere on your Desktop and select “Properties”.

Select the “Appearance” tab and press the “Effects” button.

In the pop-up settings screen, you can uncheck everything, or just some effects as you desire, then press “Okay”, and then press “Apply”.

#3 Defragment Your Hard Drive – Either using the Windows Defragger tool or some 3rd party Defragger, you should defragment your hard drive at least once per month, I do it once per week, to keep your disk optimized and running faster–which means your whole system runs faster.

I use the free tool Auslogics Disk Defrag because it seems to be faster and stronger than the default Windows Defragger tool.

#4 Clean Your Registry – over time your Windows registry will become cluttered with bad, outdated and unnecessary entries, so cleaning these out will speed up registry reading and access which helps to improve overall performance.

You DO NOT want to start messing around in the Registry file on your own, one wrong move can crash your system and prevent it from booting up again. Fortunately, there are good, free tools available to help with this process.

What I use is CCleaner, and I always make sure to take advantage of the option to make a backup of your registry before every cleaning. I tend to test a lot of software, which means lots of installations and uninstalls on my computer, so I run CCleaner every week, but running it once per month is probably enough for most users.

#5 Lower Your Color Depth – Most people will never notice a difference between running their monitors at 16-bit or higher color depths, but the higher the color depth setting the more resources your display are using, so by lowering the setting to 16-bit or even 24-bit will provide a small boost to your system.

To change this setting simply Right click anywhere on your Desktop and select “Properties”.

Select the “Settings” tab and under Color Quality use the drop-down listing to reduce your color depth setting, then click “Apply”.

#6 Clean Up That Disk Clutter – before running your monthly (or weekly) Disk Defragmentation, run the Disk Cleanup tool on your hard drive to remove unnecessary or unwanted files that can get left behind by programs and build up over time.

To run this just open Explorer and Right click on your main hard drive then select “Properties”.

In the pop-up screen you will see the Disk Cleanup button, press it and follow the on-screen directions. After it completes is an optimal time to run your Disk Defragger.

#7 Clean Up Your Desktop – while it may seem convenient to keep icons for every program and file on your computer right there on the Desktop, the fact is the more icons you have on the Desktop the slower your Desktop will load and respond to your actions.

Windows has an easy Start Menu that you can organize to best suit your needs, as well as a Quick Launch toolbar for your most used programs, these are the places that your program icons should be rather than on the Desktop.

For files, if you don’t want to use the My Documents features to keep your files organized, then just creating a single new folder on your Desktop and dumping all of your individual files into it will make a difference. The bottom line is you don’t want a bunch of icons and files sitting on your Desktop if you’re concerned with performance.

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There’s a lot more users can do to improve their PC performance, but I wanted to start with 7 and if this is helpful to readers I will write additional follow-ups with even more tips.

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