How to Make Your Windows XP Computer Run Faster

First of all, I recommend that you go to Trend Micro’s House Call http://housecall.trendmicro.com, it’s a free virus scanner that will go through your system and remove any hidden viruses and spyware you may have. Trend will bring up a screen once the scanning is complete telling you about potential threats on your computer; choose to remove items as necessary.

Step2

Defragment Window Next it’s a good idea to defragment your hard drive, unless you’ve done so recently or you have your computer set to do it on its own. Defragmenting will push all of the information on your disk closer together, freeing up space and making the accessing of files more efficient (meaning faster!).

To defragment your drive go to START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, SYSTEM TOOLS and finally click on DISK DEFRAGMENTER. At this point you’ll get a window with two options, analyze and defragment. If you don’t know if it’s necessary for you to defragment your drive now click “analyze” and your system will let you know in a few seconds, or just click “defragment”. Once your system is defragmenting it may take a long time, the longer it takes the “worse” your drive was! I recommend restarting your computer now so changes come into effect.

Step3

Okay, now that your computer has been restarted, go ahead and move around in your system. Are things moving better? Or do you think it could use some more improvement? If you find yourself wanting more speed continue on to step 4.

Step4

Services Window This step involves going into your services file and disabling programs you don’t want to start up when you turn on the computer. It’s wise to make a backup of your system so you can restore it should anything go wrong. Proceed with caution, as this is the most “dangerous” step!

To see what’s running in your background you’re going to need click START, RUN and then type in services.msc. You’ll see a window open showing the services running on your computer. I recommend going to see the Elder Geek http://www.theeldergeek.com/a.htm and look at each individual service you have running and make an educated decision on what services to keep and which ones you want to go, if you find you’ve got something on your list not mentioned on The Elder Geek go ahead and do a general search by the title or path. This is where I generally find spy and adware on the computers I’ve cleaned in the past. If you still can’t figure out what a specific service does I recommend you leave it, better safe than sorry.