99 Performance Tips For Windows XP

A friend of mine asked me to check out the PC he was working on as it was getting slower by the day. He was running Windows XP home and shared the computer with his wife and his two lovely girls who unfortunately decided to install lots of "female" orientated applications like riding games, animated screensavers and the like. After getting rid of 185 Spyware entries I told him that he could speed up his PC which had only 256 Mb of RAM if he disabled some features of Windows XP.

Some of the features that I disabled yesterday are also mentioned in the pcstats beginner's guide. I do not advice you to use each of the 99 tips, for example I would not recommend to overclock your PC unless you know what you are doing and are aware of the consequences. Categories worth taking a look at are "Windows XP Software and Registry Performance Tweaks" and "Improving Windows XP boot speed" which can have a great effect on overall speed of the system.

Update: The authors of the original article have published one for Windows Vista as well. While you certainly will find tips in the Vista performance article that were already described in the XP guide, you also find new tips that are specifically tailored to the new operating system.

Update 2: With both Windows Vista and Windows XP slowly reaching the end of their life-cycle, it feels a bit surprising that the developers have not posted a guide for Windows 7 as well on their site. While it is certainly possible to use the majority of Windows Vista performance tips instead, Windows 7 users will encounter situations where Windows Vista or XP tips won't work on their systems.

You may want to check out our Windows Tips section for up to date tips for all Windows systems. We have started posting tips for Windows XP and followed through whenever new versions of Windows have been released by Microsoft.

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