Here are the simple ways to optimize performance your Windows:-
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows XP
Disclaimer:-This article is taken from here:-
1. Disable Indexing Services
Indexing Services is a small little program that uses large amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexes and updates lists of all the files that are on your computer. It does this so that when you do a search for something on your computer, it will search faster by scanning the index lists. If you don?t search your computer often, or even if you do search often, this system service is completely unnecessary. To disable do the following:
Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. To optimise:
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:
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:
Cacheman Improves the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings.
Once Installed:
There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest is to run TCP/IP Optimizer.
If you give your pagefile a fixed size it saves the operating system from needing to resize the page file.
8. Run BootVis ? Improve Boot Times
BootVis will significantly improve boot times
Your desktop background consumes a fair amount of memory and can slow the loading time of your system. Removing it will improve performance.
Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. 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.
You must be registered for see links
1. Disable Indexing Services
Indexing Services is a small little program that uses large amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexes and updates lists of all the files that are on your computer. It does this so that when you do a search for something on your computer, it will search faster by scanning the index lists. If you don?t search your computer often, or even if you do search often, this system service is completely unnecessary. To disable do the following:
- Go to Start
- Click Settings
- Click Control Panel
- Double-click Add/Remove Programs
- Click the Add/Remove Window Components
- Uncheck the Indexing services
- Click Next
Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. To optimise:
- Go to Start
- Click Settings
- Click Control Panel
- Click System
- Click Advanced tab
- In the Performance tab click Settings
- Leave only the following ticked:
- Show shadows under menus
- Show shadows under mouse pointer
- Show translucent selection rectangle
- Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons
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:
- Open My Computer
- Click on Tools menu
- Click on Folder Options
- Click on the View tab.
- Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box
- Click Apply
- Click Ok
- Reboot your computer
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:
- Download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List.
- Then select each counter in turn in the ?Extensible performance counters? window and clear the ?performance counters enabled? checkbox at the bottom.button below
Cacheman Improves the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings.
Once Installed:
- Go to Show Wizard and select All.
- Run all the wizards by selecting Next or Finished until you are back to the main menu.
- Use the defaults unless you know exactly what you are doing.
- Exit and Save Cacheman.
- Restart Windows.
There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest is to run TCP/IP Optimizer.
- Download and install
- Click the General Settings tab and select your Connection Speed (Kbps)
- Click Network Adapter and choose the interface you use to connect to the Internet
- Check Optimal Settings then Apply
- Reboot
If you give your pagefile a fixed size it saves the operating system from needing to resize the page file.
- Right click on My Computer and select Properties
- Select the Advanced tab
- Under Performance choose the Settings button
- Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change
- Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file.
8. Run BootVis ? Improve Boot Times
BootVis will significantly improve boot times
- Download and Run
- Select Trace
- Select Next Boot and Driver Trace
- A Trace Repetitions screen will appear, select Ok and Reboot
- Upon reboot, BootVis will automatically start, analyze and log your system?s boot process. When it?s done, in the menu go to Trace and select Optimize System
- Reboot.
- When your machine has rebooted wait until you see the Optimizing System box appear. Be patient and wait for the process to complete
Your desktop background consumes a fair amount of memory and can slow the loading time of your system. Removing it will improve performance.
- Right click on Desktop and select Properties
- Select the Desktop tab
- In the Background window select None
- Click Ok
Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. 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.
- Open Control Panel
- Open Fonts folder
- 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.
- Hope you find these 10 tips useful please leave a comment below and please share any other tips you may have with other readers.
Windows Vista
Disclaimer:-This article is taken from here:-
1. Turn off UAC, or at least make it less annoying
Now, there?s a lot of talk about the new user account control policy in Vista, and all I can say is: as it is, it annoys the hell out of me and slows down my normal computer usage. Just why, oh why, does it have to flash my video card to a black screen, take 5 seconds and really just make itself a royal pain in the arse?
To turn it off, the easiest way is to go into the Control Panel and type in ?UAC? into the search bar. It?ll bring up a search result of ?Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off?. Just follow the prompts from there.
To keep some of the security of the UAC, let?s just turn off the crazy annoying blacking out screen bit. To do this:
2. Disable Aero
I personally do not do this, as I am a fan of the graphical styles, but I realize it comes at a cost. It does tend to eat up both RAM and CPU usage (as well as video card usage). While it is turned off during gaming, you can still notice its effects during normal computer usage. When it is really cranking, it can use 15% of your CPU. Ouch. Vanity comes at a cost.
If you do like it, at least turn it down a couple notches. Some performance increases have nothing to do with strain on hardware, or amount of processing. Sometimes, things are designed to take longer than they should, though only maybe a fraction of a second, but the end result to the user is a faster machine. Minimizing and maximizing does an animation. Watch closely. Pretty quick eh? Still, it does slow you down, and, really, what does it add to your experience? I am all about vanity and aesthetics, but this feature has got to go.
Relish in the fact you will be increasing your productivity by 0.2 seconds per minimize/maximize.
ReadyBoost is one of the more innovative features of Vista. The idea behind it is to use solid state memory as a secondary memory cache (before hard drivecaching). It does require a certain level of speed from your USB (or other) flash drive. Do a quick search on google for just the fastest USB flash drive you can get your hands on (don?t worry they are cheap) and buy one.
To enable ReadyBoost, just plug in a fast flash drive, and AutoPlay should come up with a dialog stating that you can use it for readyboost. If you have disabled it, you can just go to the properties for the drive and select it under the readyboost tab. Easy as cake. It is no substitution for RAM, but one can get a several GB flash drive for very little. Some sites have stated that the improvements are not as much as MS says they are, but even a minor improvement for such a low investment makes this worth your while. Do find the best drive you can for random reads/writes (the drive speed is usually rated for sequential reads which won?t help you much).
I personally don?t mind the new search too much. It still hogs a lot of resources though. To turn it off completely:
5. While you are at it, fix the rest of your search options
It is often that I do searches for text in files, like a method use in a PHP file, or maybe something in a java file. Regardless of the situation, Windows Vista has a very limited number of file extensions flagged for full text searching, which causes you to get ?no results? when you know there are some.
Pretty self explanatory. It?s a heavy and ugly. If you use it, great, if you don?t reclaim some desktop space. Install googles version. Or yahoos.
7. Defender has a use?
Yes, windows defender actually has a purpose!
8. Tweak your services
Well, this one is arguable. Many sites preach service tweaking as the end all of tweaks, and Vista does have a lot of services (like 130). However, a good portion of them are set to manual or disabled by default. Manual will only start the service when the operating system thinks it needs to use that program. However, Vista does have a lot of services set to Automatic by default that are not needed for many people. Granted, they are usually sleeping, not using any CPU, and if they use memory, they usually get paged out to disk pretty fast. But, regardless, it is fairly quick to do, and will gain you some improvement.
First off, how to tell what you should really be worried about. One new feature in Vista is the ?Go to Service? feature in Task Manager (or at least I never noticed it before). Open Task Manager, Processes tab, right click on a particularly heavy process, and select ?Go to Service (s)?. This will jump you over to the services tab, and select all the services that are running under that process (multiple ones are usually running under svchost.exe, many of the others only map to one service).
It also works in reverse (select service, right click and go to process) I have something like 75 services running at this very moment. Many of them I have exactly zero use for. I do not have a printer, but print spooler is running and using a whole whopping 1MB of my ram at the moment. There are heavier examples, but even if you can remove 20 of these, is it worth your time? Well, yes and no. Like I said, many of them are already paged out, so they really aren?t affecting your system?s memory. There is added overhead because the scheduler still needs to manage them, but I cannot for the life of me remember how it is done in Windows.
Overall maybe minimal, but if you are going for every ounce of tweak-ness, give it a shot. I?d recommend Speedyvista look for their cheatsheet or registry files pages so you can keep a copy of the default services around for when/if you mess it up and need to get back to default.
9. How to find out the next area for improvement ? Tweak your programs
Well, you?ve gotten the operating system down to a certain point, what?s next? Well, figure out where your bottlenecks still are! There?s probably some software on your computer that just kills performance (or 6-7 of them). Don?t blame MS quite yet. Anyway, luckily for you Windows Vista has a simple tool included that can help you identify the problem and remedy it quickly.
10. Not really a tweak but?
Ok, #10 isn?t really a speed tweak, but it?s something I?ve always found annoying on many operating systems. Many of us have 2 LCDs, and oh wouldn?t it be nice to be able to set different backgrounds for both? There are programs out there that do it, but here?s a way to just do it inside windows.
You must be registered for see links
1. Turn off UAC, or at least make it less annoying
Now, there?s a lot of talk about the new user account control policy in Vista, and all I can say is: as it is, it annoys the hell out of me and slows down my normal computer usage. Just why, oh why, does it have to flash my video card to a black screen, take 5 seconds and really just make itself a royal pain in the arse?
To turn it off, the easiest way is to go into the Control Panel and type in ?UAC? into the search bar. It?ll bring up a search result of ?Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off?. Just follow the prompts from there.
To keep some of the security of the UAC, let?s just turn off the crazy annoying blacking out screen bit. To do this:
- Open group policy (start | run | gpedit.msc)
- Then navigate to Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Local Policies | Security Options
- Find the policy named ?User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation?. Set this to disabled.
2. Disable Aero
I personally do not do this, as I am a fan of the graphical styles, but I realize it comes at a cost. It does tend to eat up both RAM and CPU usage (as well as video card usage). While it is turned off during gaming, you can still notice its effects during normal computer usage. When it is really cranking, it can use 15% of your CPU. Ouch. Vanity comes at a cost.
If you do like it, at least turn it down a couple notches. Some performance increases have nothing to do with strain on hardware, or amount of processing. Sometimes, things are designed to take longer than they should, though only maybe a fraction of a second, but the end result to the user is a faster machine. Minimizing and maximizing does an animation. Watch closely. Pretty quick eh? Still, it does slow you down, and, really, what does it add to your experience? I am all about vanity and aesthetics, but this feature has got to go.
Relish in the fact you will be increasing your productivity by 0.2 seconds per minimize/maximize.
- Open your start menu, go to run, and type in ?systempropertiesperformance?
- From the Visual Effects tab, uncheck ?Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing?
- While you are here, might as well check out the other goodies you can disable.
ReadyBoost is one of the more innovative features of Vista. The idea behind it is to use solid state memory as a secondary memory cache (before hard drivecaching). It does require a certain level of speed from your USB (or other) flash drive. Do a quick search on google for just the fastest USB flash drive you can get your hands on (don?t worry they are cheap) and buy one.
To enable ReadyBoost, just plug in a fast flash drive, and AutoPlay should come up with a dialog stating that you can use it for readyboost. If you have disabled it, you can just go to the properties for the drive and select it under the readyboost tab. Easy as cake. It is no substitution for RAM, but one can get a several GB flash drive for very little. Some sites have stated that the improvements are not as much as MS says they are, but even a minor improvement for such a low investment makes this worth your while. Do find the best drive you can for random reads/writes (the drive speed is usually rated for sequential reads which won?t help you much).
- What speed drive do I need?
2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes. - What size drive do I need?
256MB to 4GB, where as best performance is gotten at around a 1:1 to a 2:1 flash to ram ratio. So really, you should never try this with a flash drive smaller than 1GB-2GB.
I personally don?t mind the new search too much. It still hogs a lot of resources though. To turn it off completely:
- Go to my computer, right click on C: drive, go to the General tab, and uncheck Index this drive for faster searching, select Include subfolders and files.
- If you want, you can just remove any extra areas of search, so you can keep your fast searching for some areas.
5. While you are at it, fix the rest of your search options
It is often that I do searches for text in files, like a method use in a PHP file, or maybe something in a java file. Regardless of the situation, Windows Vista has a very limited number of file extensions flagged for full text searching, which causes you to get ?no results? when you know there are some.
- Open Control panel and type in ?indexing? into the search box (or you can do this from your start menu, but many people turn it off).
- Select ?Indexing Options?
- Select Advanced Button
- Select ?File Types? Tab
- In this list you will see a list of extensions. When you click on most of them, the bottom radio button will change from ?index properties only? or ?index properties and file contents?
- Honestly, index properties only is pretty useless for what most people will use search for (i.e. really only search by date).
- Uncheck a box to have it removed from search. This can be done for a variety of extensions that honestly, you don?t want in search anyway. It will actually help your results.
- Change the radio button to ?index properties and file contents? to have these file types included in your searches (should be set for word docs, etc and any other text-based files you search for)
Pretty self explanatory. It?s a heavy and ugly. If you use it, great, if you don?t reclaim some desktop space. Install googles version. Or yahoos.
7. Defender has a use?
Yes, windows defender actually has a purpose!
- Open it up
- Click on tools
- Click on Software Explorer
- This will let you select groups of items, the default is Startup Programs.
Now you can see that oh, Open Office quickstart is there, and I can just disable it there.
8. Tweak your services
Well, this one is arguable. Many sites preach service tweaking as the end all of tweaks, and Vista does have a lot of services (like 130). However, a good portion of them are set to manual or disabled by default. Manual will only start the service when the operating system thinks it needs to use that program. However, Vista does have a lot of services set to Automatic by default that are not needed for many people. Granted, they are usually sleeping, not using any CPU, and if they use memory, they usually get paged out to disk pretty fast. But, regardless, it is fairly quick to do, and will gain you some improvement.
First off, how to tell what you should really be worried about. One new feature in Vista is the ?Go to Service? feature in Task Manager (or at least I never noticed it before). Open Task Manager, Processes tab, right click on a particularly heavy process, and select ?Go to Service (s)?. This will jump you over to the services tab, and select all the services that are running under that process (multiple ones are usually running under svchost.exe, many of the others only map to one service).
It also works in reverse (select service, right click and go to process) I have something like 75 services running at this very moment. Many of them I have exactly zero use for. I do not have a printer, but print spooler is running and using a whole whopping 1MB of my ram at the moment. There are heavier examples, but even if you can remove 20 of these, is it worth your time? Well, yes and no. Like I said, many of them are already paged out, so they really aren?t affecting your system?s memory. There is added overhead because the scheduler still needs to manage them, but I cannot for the life of me remember how it is done in Windows.
Overall maybe minimal, but if you are going for every ounce of tweak-ness, give it a shot. I?d recommend Speedyvista look for their cheatsheet or registry files pages so you can keep a copy of the default services around for when/if you mess it up and need to get back to default.
9. How to find out the next area for improvement ? Tweak your programs
Well, you?ve gotten the operating system down to a certain point, what?s next? Well, figure out where your bottlenecks still are! There?s probably some software on your computer that just kills performance (or 6-7 of them). Don?t blame MS quite yet. Anyway, luckily for you Windows Vista has a simple tool included that can help you identify the problem and remedy it quickly.
- Open the task manager (many ways to get to it, easiest is ctrl+alt+delete then select Start Task Manager)
- Navigate to the Performance tab
- Click on Resource Monitor
- Expand the disk section and sort by either reads or writes column.
10. Not really a tweak but?
Ok, #10 isn?t really a speed tweak, but it?s something I?ve always found annoying on many operating systems. Many of us have 2 LCDs, and oh wouldn?t it be nice to be able to set different backgrounds for both? There are programs out there that do it, but here?s a way to just do it inside windows.
- Right click on the background and select Personalization.
- Click on Desktop Background
- Select a background image that is at least as wide as the combined resolution of both of your monitors (or scale the image up so it is big enough, else you will get tiling.. it takes some tweaking, so get out your photo editor of choice for this one.
- Select the Tile picture positioning option as shown below. This is the only option that will display your background image across.
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