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Speed up Windows XP and Windows Vista, tweak performance, free up disk space, and optimize your computer.

Everyone complains about how slow their Windows computer or laptop gets. You do too. Here are some simple changes you can make to dramatically improve things.

Note: While there are a hundred ways you can squeeze more juice out of Windows by changing settings in the System Registry, that is beyond the scope of this article. These tips will probably account for 80% of the performance improvement you can possibly get; the registry tweaks will get you the final 20%.

Free up disk space

Turn off System Restore
System Restore creates a “snapshot” of your computer every time you make changes to the system (install programs, update device drivers, more). Should things go wrong, you can “roll back” the system to the last-known good configuration. This is great in theory, but you’ll probably never use it. Just don’t go about installing random applications, and you can safely turn it off and reclaim disk space.

On Windows XP, System Restore is located in Control Panel -> System -> System Restore. Select the “Turn off System Restore on all drives” option. On Windows Vista, navigate to Control Panel -> System. Click on “Advanced System Settings” and then on the “System Protection” tab. See screenshot:

Turn off Disk Indexing

Windows creates a database of all your files so you can do fast file searches. My advice is to leave search to a good desktop search application like Google Desktop. So turn off disk indexing.

Open My Computer, right-click on your Hard Drive icon (C: or D:) and choose “Properties”. At the bottom of the dialog box that opens, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching”. and click on “OK”. In the dialog box that opens, select “Apply changes to drive C:\, sub-folders and files”, and click on “OK”. See screenshot:

Delete hidden monsters with WinDirStat
Use WinDirStat to clean up files that are occupying space on your drive but are hidden deep in sub-sub directories. Manually searching for all these files is practically impossible.

WinDirStat displays a “Tree-map” view of your entire filesystem. Each file is a colored rectangle. Larger files are larger rectangles. All files in a directory are again arranged as a single rectangle. So the directory rectangle size is proportional to the size of that sub-tree.

For instance, here’s a view of my C: drive:

I can see that there’s a large file in the bottom right-hand side of the tree-map. It happens to be a file in the “MSOCache” folder. Running a quick check on the Internet for “MSOCache” reveals that it contains installation files for Microsoft Office, which can be safely deleted if you have the installation DVD. Deleting the MSOCache folder will free up 550MB on my hard drive – and I hadn’t known that it even existed.

Of course, as always, beware of what you delete.

CrapCleaner
Automatically cleans up your reycle bin, web browser caches, temporary files that have accumulated in your system for months, and lots of other lint that occupies needless space. On typically sluggish computers, I have cleaned up over 1GB of this sort of trash. See screenshot:

Now for the standard stuff, which everyone all too often forgets:

Uninstall Programs from Control Panel
In the Control Panel, under “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista) look for:

• Multiple music and video players, browsers, chat clients, photo editing software
• Trial versions of programs
• Games you don’t play anymore
• Multiple toolbars for browsers: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Real, StumbleUpon, and countless others

and get rid of them all. While uninstalling,

• Select the “Complete uninstall” option if there is one.
• Select the “Delete personal data and settings” option if there is one.

Keep only a minimal set of applications that you use regularly. Once you’re done, navigate to the Program Files folder under C: and remove the folder for the application you uninstalled – Uninstalling often doesn’t automatically remove this folder.

Uninstall Microsoft Office components
If you don’t use Microsoft Office applications like Project, Access, Visio but still have them installed, get rid of them.

• From the “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista), look for “Microsoft Office”
• Click on the “Change” button against the entry for Office
• In the subsequent dialog box, select “Add or remove features”, and deselect the components you don’t need

Don’t install language files
If you run Windows in English, there’s usually no need to install support for additional languages. Whenever you install an application, always make sure you choose “Custom Install”, and deselect the “Support for additional languages” option. For instance, here’s the ‘Custom Install” dialog box during the WinDirStat installation:

Speed up Computer

Defragment your Hard Drives

The oldest and least followed trick in the book. Windows can locate and access files faster on a defragmented disk. This means a noticeable difference in performance, for no cost at all. Run Disk Defragmenter once every couple of months. Set up your laptop defrag to run during lunchtime, or your desktop overnight. Disk Defragmenter is located under Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools.

On Windows XP, you can choose which drive to defragment, and there’s a graphical bar that shows before and after defragmentation views of the drives on your disk. On Windows Vista, Disk Defragmenter is rather opaque, with just a “Defragment Now” and a “Modify Schedule” button. See screenshot:

Stop Applications from loading during startup
Having too many applications start automatically when you turn on your computer slows down your startup time, hogs system memory and slows down overall performance. Keep only the ones you need.

• Under Windows XP, go to Start -> Run and type “msconfig” in the box that pops up
• Under Windows Vista, go to Start and type “msconfig” in the search box at the bottom
• Choose “Selective Startup” in the System Configuration box
• On the Startup tab, deselect the applications you don’t want automatically started when you switch on your computer. You’ll be surprised at how many there are.

Use Lite applications

• Use Foxit Reader in place of Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Winamp Classic in place of Winamp Modern
• OpenOffice 2.4 in place of Office 2003/2007
• VLC Media Player in place of Windows Media Player
• CDBurnerXP or IMGBurn in place of Nero Burning ROM
• Windows XP in place of Windows Vista

Store your documents on a separate drive
The “My Documents” folder is usually on the same C: drive as the rest of the Operating System. This means more frequent fragmentation of your drive, leave less space for your system’s paging file and reduced performance. Moving your personal documents to another D: drive will both improve performance marginally and protect your documents should you need to install Windows on C: drive again.

With these simple tips, you avoid doing anything dramatic to harm your computer, and also get surprising gains in free disk space and in performance. Think of it simply as keeping your computer in shape. You owe your machine that.

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You might also be interested reading:

• “The computer is so slow these days”
• The real problem behind Microsoft’s layoffs
• Windows Vista and the “blogosphere”
• And the PC becomes more irrelevant…
• Notes on digital cameras and Linux.