1. Disable file indexing. This is a tiny service that uses a great deal of RAM and induces much disk thrashing. Your system instantly becomes more responsive. Here's how: First, doubleclick the My Computer icon. Then, right-click on the C: Drive, then hit Properties. Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching." Next, apply changes to "C: subfolders and files," and click OK.

2. Zap the Windows Prefetch folder every week. Windows XP can "prefetch" portions of data and applications that are frequently loaded. This allows processes appear to start faster when requested the user. Over time, the prefetch folder overwhelms with references to files and applications no longer in use. Guess what happens? Windows XP wastes time and grinds to a halt by pre-loading obsolete data. It helps you gain some performance on your XP Professional to periodically empty the prefetch folder.

The prefetch folder resides on your local hard disk, under the Windows folder.
%systemroot%\prefetch
-or-
X:\windows\prefetch

Where X is the drive letter where you have Windows installed. Either path will get you to your local system. The second path is for those who have the default installation on the most commonly used drive letter, C:\

3. Optimise Display Settings. Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. Kill unnecessary animations, and nix active desktop. Here's how to do it:
1) Go to Start
2) Click Settings
3) Click Control Panel
4) Click System
5) Click Advanced tab
6) In the Performance tab click Settings
7) Leave only the following ticked:
(1) Show shadows under menus
(2) Show shadows under mouse pointer
(3) Show translucent selection rectangle
(4) Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
(5) Use visual styles on windows and buttons
Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the stability of the computer - only its responsiveness.

4. Remove the Desktop Picture Your desktop background consumes a fair amount of memory and can slow the loading time of your system. Removing it will improve performance.
1) Right click on Desktop and select Properties
2) Select the Desktop tab
3) In the Background window select None
4) Click Ok

5. Remove Fonts for Speed Zap extra fonts fonts installed on their computer. Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. The more fonts they have, the more lethargic the system will become. Anything over 300 fonts tax the system and slow down load times- especially graphic apps. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require.
1) Open Control Panel
2) Open Fonts folder
3) Move fonts you don't need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:\FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain.

6. Speedup Folder Browsing You may have noticed that everytime you open my computer to browse folders that there is a slight delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing significantly:
1) Open My Computer
2) Click on Tools menu
3) Click on Folder Options
4) Click on the View tab.
5) Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box
6) Click Apply
7) Click Ok
8) Reboot your computer
To prevent a single Windows Explorer window tanking up takes the rest of your OS down, you can launch separate folder windows in multi processes. Open My Computer, hit on Tools, then Folder Options. Click on the View tab. Scroll down to "Launch folder windows in a separate process," and enable this option.

7. Disable Performance Counters Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC's performance. These utilities take up system resources so disabling is a good idea. To disable:
1) download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List
2) Then select each counter in turn in the 'Extensible performance counters' window and clear the 'performance counters enabled' checkbox at the bottom button below

8. Optimise Your Pagefile Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. While this is good for systems with smaller amounts of memory (under 512MB) it is unlikely that a typical XP desktop system will ever need 1.5 X 512MB or more of virtual memory. If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have 512MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size.
1) Right click on My Computer and select Properties
2) Select the Advanced tab
3) Under Performance choose the Settings button
4) Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change
5) Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file.

9. Improve Memory Usage PC Washer improves the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings.

Once Installed:
1) Click the 'Tools' from the left menu
2) Select 'Memory Booster' in the tools list. A new window named 'PC Turbo Memory' will popup.
3) Click Defragment button in the new window.
4) Exit the program. That's all.

10. Disable unnecessary services Windows XP loads services you will never need. To determine which services you can disable for your client, visit the Black Viper site for ideal Windows XP configurations. Here are a few services I booted off to streamline my PC:
* Alerter
* Background Intelligent Transfer Service
* ClipBook
* Computer Browser
* Error Reporting Service
* Help and Support
* Indexing Service
* IPSEC Services
* Messenger
* NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
* Network DDE
* Network DDE DSDM
* Performance Logs and Alerts
* Portable Media Serial Number
* QOS RSVP
* Help Session Manager
* Remote Registry
* Secondary Logon
* Server
* Smart Card
* Smart Card Helper
* SSDP Discovery Service
* System restore Service
* TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
* Uninterruptible Power Supply
* Universal Plug and Play Device Host
* WebClient
* Windows time
* Wireless Zero Configuration
* WMI Performance Adapter

11. Disconnect USB devices you aren't using. When Windows starts, it must load all the drivers for the devices connected to your computer. If you have many devices connected to the USB ports, such as printers, scanners, cameras and hard drives that you don't use on a regular basis, disconnect them. You can reconnect them when you use them. Disconnecting them when they are not in use will allow Windows to load the drivers only when needed.

The above steps should help increase the performance of Windows XP as well as keep it running with more stability.

In Windows XP: Right click My Computer and select Properties Click on Advanced tab Click on Error Reporting Click/check Disable error reporting Click OK

Turn off Thumbs.db Posted 8/12/2002 by TweakXP Member

Thumbs.db is a file which is created in a folder with Movies or Pictures so that you can view a piece of their content without actualy opening them (you can't see thumbnails unless you have the option to view system files turned on). Thumbs.db is there so that you don't need to reload a thumbnail everytime you browse that folder. Sad fact is, is Thumbs.db takes up about 2kb per file and if you edit a lot of stuff its annoying to keep seeing them popping up all over your computer. You can remove thumbs.db quite easily by following these steps:

1. Go to Run in the startmenu 2. Type gpedit.msc 3. Click OK and the Group Policy will open 4. Go to User Configuration/Administrative Template/Windows Components/Windows Explorer 5. Scroll down to the bottom of the long list of stuff that now shows up in the menu on the right. Double-Click on Turn off caching of thumbnail pictures. 6. Click on Enable then Apply, Ok. And now you no longer have this annoying problem.

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Change IE Windows Title Posted 10/26/2004 by TweakXP Member

In regedit navigate to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Change (or create) the value of the string "Window Title" to whatever you want on the titlebar of Internet Explorer.

To have no title except the title of the web pages you are browsing do not enter anything for a value.

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Change XP Boot Screen Posted 8/12/2002 by TweakXP Member If you would like to change your boot up screen follow the directions below. These instructions assume that you have a place to download the boot screen from the net. If you would like to download a boot screen, visit http://www.themexp.org

1. Backup (copy) the file %windir%\system32\ntoskrnl.exe (most likely C:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe - the boot screen) 2. Download the .zip to your computer (important: make sure to get the right version, XP or XP SP1) 3. Extract ntoskrnl.exe to a directory other than %windir%\system32 (most likely C:\windows\system32) 4. Reboot your computer into Safe Mode (hit F8 before the boot screen) or into true DOS (from a boot disk) 5. Overwrite the file %windir%\system32\ntoskrnl.exe (which should have been backed up) with the extracted exe 6. Reboot your computer as you normally would

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Creating 'App Paths' in Windows XP Posted 8/12/2002 by TweakXP Member To create an app path, so you can run an application in Windows Xp from the Run dialog box you need to:

1. Run regedit and go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths

2. Create a new key with the what ever you want to use as your run command, ie HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\whatever.exe

3. In the key folder that you created, create a new string, call it 'Path' and modify the value to point the specific folder of your executable your running. ie C:\ProgramFiles\whatever

4. Use the default string and modify it's value to point to the executable you want to run.

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Reboot or shut down PC quickly Posted 8/12/2002 by TweakXP Member For a one-click method to quickly shut down or reboot your system without the fuss of going through the Start menu, make use of the Shutdown command, a command line utility in XP.

Here's how you can set up a restart button on your desktop:

1. Create a shortcut (Right-click on desktop, select New > Shortcut).

2. For location, type the following:

shutdown -r -t 0

3. Click Next, enter a name for the shortcut ("Restart" is appropriate), and click Finish.

When you click your Restart shortcut, Windows XP will reboot *automagically*!

The "-r" switch tells XP to reboot. If you'd like the shortcut to shut off your PC instead, change it to "-s"; to simply log off, change it to "-l". The "-t 0" sets the timeout (in seconds), so up this value if you find the need for it. To force running applications to close, add "-f" -- be careful with this one!

For more information on Shutdown, type "shutdown" in a command prompt window (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), or search for Shutdown in Windows XP's Help and Support Center.

The Window Registry contains all the hardware information,operating system settings, application software configurations, users, computer preference, and etc. The window registry also keeps information of all process running, performance counters, and kernel operations.

It is estimated that 90% of computer problems are caused by corrupted window registry.

Here the following common registry problems that plague most of the computer of today.

1. Blue Screen of Death

The Blue Screen of Death (also known as bluescreen, BSoD, and stop error) is a Microsoft error screen for most of Window OS version. The BSoD will be displayed if certain critical system error is encountered within the operating system followed by immediate shut down of the system. Faulty Memory, power supply issues, overheating of components, and over-clocking can trigger a blue screen display.

2. Computer Boot Slowly

Program software in the Start menu will consume RAM and processor resources in which Window start up will be slower. The more programs in Start Menu will cause Window to start slower. The window taskbar will also show you how many programs are running in simultaneously which great reduce your computer speed performance. Another reason for computer booting up slowly is a corrupted or missing DLL which make the Windows trying to load the culprit DLL into the memory.

3. Program Crashes

Windows will prompt a message reporting that "Program X performed an illegal operation and will be shut down�. Another scenario will be a dialog box asking user to report the problem to Microsoft and if you get this message most of the time then you registry got a problem.

4. Internet Explorer abnormal behavior

Internet Explore crashes when visiting some websites which causes by incorrect display setting, the operating system may not support a java powered website, patches are not updated or the browser version are not supported.

5. File and Program Access Difficulty

Longer file access is cause by corrupted files or corrupted software which leads to longer time in opening and saving of data. There are scenarios that while saving the data leads to program crashes that will result to outright data loss which can be frustrating most of the time.