October 14, 2005

Got Windows XP -- some tips to improve performance

WHOOPS! UPDATE -- SEE BELOW

A nice list of 23 tips for improving the performance of Windows XP (I know, reformat and install Linux unh. unh.-ed.) Some obvious, some subtle:
23 Ways to Speed Up Windows XP
4.) Disable file indexing. The indexing service extracts information from documents and other files on the hard drive and creates a "searchable keyword index." As you can imagine, this process can be quite taxing on any system.

6.) Empty the Windows Prefetch folder every three months or so. Windows XP can "prefetch" portions of data and applications that are used frequently.

13.) Turn off any and all unnecessary animations, and disable active desktop. In fact, for optimal performance, turn off all animations. Windows XP offers many different settings in this area. Here’s how to do it: First click on the System icon in the Control Panel. Next, click on the Advanced tab. Select the Settings button located under Performance. Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the reliability of the computer — only its responsiveness.

22.) If you’re sick of a single Windows Explorer window crashing and then taking the rest of your OS down with it, then follow this tip: open My Computer, click on Tools, then Folder Options....
These are excellent ideas -- I have only excerpted the quotes so please do visit the site for the full remedies. As for Jen and Me -- still running several flavours of Windows 2000. My Music Computer is running XP but that is more for a sense of discovery. Win2K is fully stable (at least more than its advocates -- ed.), bomb-proof and the performance on smaller machines is just fine. UPDATE: October 16, 2005 They are excellent ideas but they were plagerised from this guy's list. The actual author is Carey Holzman who has this excellent site. Carey also co-hosts the Computer America talk show which is kicking off it's 14th season. Carey's list is dated February 2nd, 2004; The Plagerised list is dated October 12th. Carey was kind enough to drop me a comment with links to back up his claim. I removed the link to the plagerised list and will not refer to that source again. Sorry about that! Posted by DaveH at October 14, 2005 10:26 PM