PC Upgrades

I am a firm believer in that YOU can always tweak a computer to make it run just a little bit better. That is what i like to do on a daily basis. Tweaking, to try and get a little more performance out of that old machine.

Kinda like saying "Getting more bang for the buck".

If you didn’t know, XP wasn’t tweaked when you first bought your PC.
But after time your computer starts to run a little slow,starts dragging.
Now it's time to tweak it a little bit.

Today I will share some of my personal Tweaking tips, you can take advantage of your PC, such as speeding up page loading times, and optimizing your processor efficiency.

Subtopics

* Tweaking XP - The Simple Way
* Advanced Tweaking (ADVANCED USERS ONLY)
* Increasing Boot Times*

Tweaking XP - The Simple Way

Easy: just download a few programs and whatnot. A free choice is Tweak UI, the free PowerToy from Microsoft. Google it up, download, and install. It allows settings not seen in Control Panel to be changed.

My personal choice is TuneUp Utilities, which is not free, but is a handy tool. With that program, you can do a lot, from changing your boot and login screens and formats, optimizing Internet connections, and cleaning out and fixing up the registry, to optimizing system performance values. Its a handy tool, and the trial is available at cnets Download.com.

Another great tool, even though not free, is Diskeeper. It claims to defrag more files in a faster time than Microsofts included Disk Defragmenter in a shorter time, which is actually true from a test I conducted. I got 2 computers, fresh from a reformat, and all of its drivers and the same programs installed. One ran Diskeeper, the other ran the default defragmenter. Diskeeper finished the job in around an hour, while the other defragmenter finished when I finally woke up after a good nights sleep, so… 9 hours? Big difference, huh? And the computers were the same - 10 GB formatted Macbooks on a Windows XP partition, with the same stats. So Id recommend Diskeeper to those whod like to invest a little money into faster document loading times, leading to faster virus scans and a faster computer in general. The trial is avaliable - check the Downloads section.

TweakNow RegCleaner Standard is one of the free tools I use to maintain my PC. Its quite useful, scanning for obsolete entries that can conflict with your PC, and thus speeding up the computer. However, many Unknowns can pop up, and it'd be annoying to click every single one of them, since the last version I reviewed had no select all feature for the Unknowns.

Here's a cool little trick that i recently added myself. Make a Shutdown shortcut on your desktop,So instead of having to go into start panel and choosing shutdown. Now you can just double click a program on your desktop and it will automatically shut the computer down.

Right click on your desktop, then click create New Shortcut.
In the Location text box, type “shutdown -s -t 0″ (without the quotation marks).
Name it anything you want (Shutdown is the most common) and click OK.
Now whenever you wanna shut down, just click this shortcut and...Voila.

Type “shutdown -r -t 0″ to make it a restart button.
Type “shutdown -l” to make it a logoff button.
Type “shutdown -s” to make it a standby button.
Type “shutdown -h” to make it a hibernate button.


Advanced Tweaking

These tweaks can easily be triggered through Tune-Up Utilities, but if you can’t afford it (or crack it lol) then check out this section.

ADVANCED USERS ONLY - Registry tweaks

To access the Registry, you must be an administrator.
Go to Run, type in “regedit” and hit OK.
Registry Editor pops out and you’re ready to risk screwing up your PC big time. :P
And any tweak requires a system restart, so after you’re done tweaking what you need, restart to see its effect.

Force Windows to Unload DLLs from Memory

Why tweak: Windows automatically keeps DLLs loaded in memory in case applications using it are launched later on. This can be a problem on systems with 512 MB or less, because of memory shortage. This tweak will disable DLL caching.

To tweak: Find the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer]. Create a new sub-key named “AlwaysUnloadDLL” and set the default value to 1. Delete the sub-key to re-enable DLL caching.

Disable Core System Paging

Why tweak: On default, Windows pages the system core to the disk to save memory space. This immensely slows down your PC as memory access is much faster than disk access. By disabling this feature, the core system will be kept in memory, speeding up system performance.

DO NOT USE THIS TWEAK IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN 512 MB OF RAM.

To tweak: Find the value “DisablePagingExecutive” in the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager]. Change the value to 1. Change the value to 0 to re-enable core system caching.

Other tweaks

Here is a tweak that doesn’t require traveling through the Registry:

Disabling the Wireless Configuration Zero service

IF YOU ARE CONNECTED ON A WIRELESS CONNECTION, DO NOT DISABLE THIS SERVICE.
To those who are connected through Ethernet, disabling this service will speed up boot and login times. To do this, go to Control Panel, select Classic View, then go to Administrative Tools, then open Services.
Look for the “Wireless Configuration Zero” service, then double-click it.
Stop the service then select “Disabled” in the Startup Type drop box.
The computer should load a bit faster now.

To speed up your startup
Go to start>run>type msconfig>then on startup tab untick everything besides your antivirus. This applies to vista as well but run is in accessories.


Hope you enjoyed this little special on tweaking. Happy Upgrading!