How to Speed up your Windows XP? - Getting Rid of the Fluff!

By Khoj Badami

Does your Windows XP take ages to load? Does it do EACH AND EVERY little thing slowly? Are you absolutely sick of the slow speed? Then you have come to the right article! Congratulations!

In this article we will show you how you can get rid of all the “fluff” in Windows XP, and really speed it up! You see, Windows XP is made to look very pretty. All the buttons are stylish, and everything slides out smoothly etc. But, because of all this style, the computer can start to run very slowly. In this article we will show you how you can get rid of all the style and have a really fast Windows XP.

I know, that the system will not be “pretty” anymore. But wait till you see how fast it goes! You will never look back again…

To get rid of all the “fluff” and style, you will have to use the “Performance Options” dialog box in XP. It’s tricky to find it if you do not know exactly where to look!

To display the "Performance Options" dialog box, click Start > right-click My Computer, and choose Properties.

If your system is configured to have a My Computer icon on the desktop, you could right-click it, if you prefer. Either way, the System Properties dialog box comes up!

In the "Advanced" tab click the "Settings" button under the "Performance" section and the "Performance Options" window will open.

There are tabs in the Performance Options dialog box, each covering distinct areas of performance. We are interested in the “Visual Effects” tab. This is the tab the will let you control the “style”.

I bet you never gave much thought to the “visual effects” used in Windows XP. Most people don’t; the effects are very subtle. Just little things, like shadows in key places or screen objects that slide smoothly or fade as they’re no longer needed. Visual effects can rob a system of its performance.

Some people might like the windows visual effects and want to keep them. But if you are a serious user, you probably don’t care about visual effects. You want speed. You can use the Visual Effects tab to remove all the unnecessary visual effects and speed up your system.

The Visual Effects tab on the Performance Options dialog box is where you control what effects you want Windows to display. Do so by selecting or deselecting the check boxes.

Some of the visual effects options art explained here:

Let Windows Choose What’s Best for My Computer: By default, this is selected. If you would rather dictate what Windows does, select one of the other radio buttons.

Adjust for Best Appearance: This options selects all the visual effects.

Adjust for Best Performance: This option turns off all visual effects.

Custom: To turn individual effects on and off at your will, select this option. Then you can select or de-select the individual checkboxes to have or remove particular visual effects.

We recommend that you do not use any visual effects if you really want speed. This speeds up the system a lot.

After you have made the changes to the settings, take your comp for a test drive! How is it? It’s a whole lot faster isn’t it?

Note: There are some other "Performance Options" under the "Advanced" tab that I recommend that you do not touch unless you know exactly what you are doing!

This article is a part of the "How to speed up your Windows XP?" article that you can find if you visit http://www.indiahowto.com a website that provides in-depth "How to.." articles on many different subjects.

The complete article can be found here.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Khoj_Badami

tag: speed, up, windows, xp, software, startup, boot, speed, faster, fast, slow