How To Make Your Windows Faster Than Ever Before

I  stumbled upon a tutorial on the techarena forum that has some nice (standard) tips on how to speed up your Windows operating system. You find tips that increase boot and shutdown speed, some that increase the overall performance by disabling certain services and features like indexing service and system restore. If you never tweaked your system before this article is for you.

It's also great if you always use tools to change those settings and want to learn a little bit more about your operating systems mechanics. Make sure you backup your settings before you apply those tweaks.

Update: The guide has been written with Windows XP in mind, and while much of what is suggested in it is also valid for newer versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, you will find that some are not. This may include suggestions to change features that are no longer included in this form in the operating system, or features that are now located in a different location, so that the steps to optimize it no longer work.

Here is the list of suggestions:

• DISABLE INDEXING SERVICES
• OPTIMISE DISPLAY SETTINGS
• DISABLE PERFORMANCE COUNTERS
• SPEEDUP FOLDER BROWSING
• IMPROVE MEMORY USAGE
• OPTIMISE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION
• OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE
• RUN BOOTVIS - IMPROVE BOOT TIMES
• REMOVE THE DESKTOP PICTURE
• REMOVE FONTS FOR SPEED
• DISABLE UNNECESSARY SERVICES
• TURN OFF SYSTEM RESTORE
• DEFRAGMENT YOUR PAGEFILE
• SPEEDUP FOLDER ACCESS - DISABLE LAST ACCESS UPDATE
• DISABLE SYSTEM SOUNDS
• IMPROVE BOOT TIMES
• IMPROVE SWAPFILE PERFORMANCE
• MAKE YOUR MENUS LOAD FASTER
• MAKE PROGRAMS LOAD FASTER
• IMPROVE XP SHUTDOWN SPEED
• SPEED UP BOOT TIMES
• FREE UP MEMORY
• ENSURE XP IS USING DMA MODE
• ADD CORRECT NETWORK CARD SETTINGS
• REMOVE ANNOYING DELETE CONFIRMATION MESSAGES
• DISABLE PREFETCH ON LOW MEMORY SYSTEMS

If you are running a different version of Windows, that is not Windows XP, then I'd suggest you look at guides designed for that version of Windows instead.