The professional blog of Christopher Randel

A few tips to speed up Windows XP – both booting up and in use.

I know this is sort of a generic post, but its something I’ve been spending a lot of time at work doing lately; people complain there computer is “slow” or takes forever to load things up, etc.  So here we go:

1. Run a single instance of anti-virus, and use a spyware removal tool if you have popups or other software that is constantly nagging you.

My favorite anti-virus is Eset’s NOD32. It has a small footprint [doesn't use a lot of resources] is fast, and updates itself several times a day. I also have used and recommend F-secure and Kaspersky. I don’t really care for Norton Antivirus or McAfee; I’ve seen viruses and malware disable or work around these much more easily than other antivirus clients.

Spyware removal in my mind has one program to use: Spybot Search and Destroy. I occasionally supplement it with Lavasoft Ad-Aware. 

If you have another product, and are questionable about it, a great resource is spywarewarrior.com.

2. Speed up boot-up and overall system usage by running less programs at start-up and during system use

How many little icons do you have in the bottom right corner of your windows install? If its more than 1 or 2, you’re probably running stuff you don’t necessarily have too.

Remember when your xp installation was nice and new and fresh, and felt zippy? After 6 months of usage, installing programs, etc etc, its feeling a bit sludgy on boot-up.

So how the heck do you keep these programs, services and whatever from starting up and running?

A good start is to figure out what is running I have used hijackthis to get my bearings on what’s installed, and it gives you the options to remove things. You can google each individual thing to figure out what it does. A few things that I often turn off autostart might be:

• Quicktime Quicklaunch/Task Icon
• Sun/Java update 
• Adobe speed launch [I like to call it adobe slow the rest of your computer launch]
• Steam [for you gamers. autostarts normally. takes a while to load]
• Any Printer applications [HP has a bad habit of doing this]
• Any Dell, Lenovo/IBM or HP startup tools [95% of the time, they are truly worthless]

There are at least six places programs can be told to “startup” for you to check, that I know about.

• C:\Documents and Settings\[Your Windows Username]\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\
• C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\
• Regedit -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
• Regedit -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\explorer\
• Regedit -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
• Regedit -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\explorer\

Tags: Anti-Virus, speed up, Spyware Removal, windows xp