This section is going to deal with one thing, and one thing, alone.  If you want tips on tweaking the Control Panel and such, read the ‘Serious’ guide.

The reason Windows slows down over time has very little to do with Windows, itself.  It has to do with all of the programs that have been installed since.

Many, if not most, programs install a "pre-loader" that runs during boot-up and pre-loads a couple of the program’s libraries and such into memory.  This way the program opens much quicker when you run it.

Now, if only one program did this, it wouldn’t be any big deal.  But when thirty programs do it, they’ve just sucked up half of your machine’s memory and here comes the slow-down.

Want to see something startling?  Go to Start Menu, ‘Run’, fire up "msconfig".  Click on the ‘Startup’ panel.

This window is empty on a brand new Windows.

Every one of these pre-loaders has been installed since Windows, and every one of them is gobbling up memory.

Obviously, the only ones that should be there are programs that you actually want to run during boot-up, such as firewalls, anti-virus and -spyware programs, and whatever specific programs you want running.

A few hardware devices might require a file to get going.  My Logitech mouse has an entry, and my Intel video card runs a few small programs to enhance the quality.  On the other hand, my Realtek audio card installs some daffy mixer panel, so not all programs associated with hardware devices are necessary.  I don’t know if they still do it, but Hewlett-Packard printers used to pre-load a huge printer driver so that you wouldn’t have to (gasp!) wait a whole two seconds when you first print something.  It’s outta heah.

When it comes to programs, very few will actually require a pre-loader.  I can only think of two that I’ve run over the years, Adobe Acrobat and Acronis True Image.  And you won’t actually be deleting the entries, just unchecking them, so if something later doesn’t work, just turn its pre-loader back on and reboot.

To help identify the entries, grab the little separator bar in between ‘Command’ and ‘Location’ and make the ‘Command’ box wider.  That will show you the path to the guilty program.  Unless it’s something you know you want, uncheck it.

If your machine felt like it was operating a little sluggishly before, it sure won’t after boot-up.  If it does, then there’s something else dramatically wrong with the system and reinstalling Windows would be the best bet.

 

  
There are actually a whole pisspot full of WinXP tweaks you can make.  Some do tons of good, others might speed up some function by a whopping 0.000351%.  Plus, whether or not some of them do any good might depend upon what other hardware and software you have on your system.  None of them will decrease performance, however, so you might as well run through them all.

Following is what I do to a fresh WinXP system.  You can decide which tweaks to make as you go along.  This is set up to be a snappy system, no fancy stuff like window transitions, animated drop-down menus, whatever.

First, go here, grab TweakUI and install it.  It contains a whole bunch of Windows settings which you’ll want to use.  We’ll cover it in a bit.
 

Pre-Loaders

The first and most important tweak to make is getting rid of the pre-loaders.  Read and do the ‘Setup – Easy’ guide.
 

Control Panel

There are a few items here that need some tweaking, and one of them will dramatically alter the overall ‘quickness’ of the system.

Administrative Tools

If you’d like to change the drive letter of your partitions or drives, open Administrative Tools, Computer Management, click on ‘Disk Management’.  Click on the desired drive or partition with the right mouse button and change the drive letter.

If you want to change a ROM drive, put a disc in it first, and leave it in during a reboot.  You can also change the drive letter of memory sticks, smart cards, etc.
 

Display

Theme Panel:  If you’re going for a snappy system, then all of the XP junk has got to go.  Select ‘Windows Classic’ for a trim and clean look.]

Note: When you get the theme all tweaked, do a ‘Save As’ so you can re-load it in the future in case things go funky.  (Internet Explorer 8 occasionally pops up with a black tool bar; the fix is to flip the Display to a different theme, then back to your own)

Appearance Panel:  Click on ‘Effects’.  If going for a snappy system, uncheck the first box.

In regards to the second option, you should do a test to see if your system looks better with ClearType or not.  They say you’re supposed to use ClearType if you have an LCD monitor, but I don’t find that true on my system.  Some of the smaller text might be a bit sharper, but other things don’t look as good.  So decide how it looks on your own system.

The ‘Advanced’ button is how you change the colors of the window title bars and such.  You first click on the area you want to change up above, then the little color boxes to make the change.

Personally, I like the ‘millennium blue’ background, but it needs to be a bit darker, so I made mine (Red-Green-Blue) 28-60-85.  I made the two title colors 40-70-100 and 100-150-200.  For that matter, I’ve always hated that white-text-on-blue highlight color they’ve used since Win98 and still use the gold highlight they used in Win95.  If you want to give it a retro spin, click on ‘Selected’ and make the two colors 250-212-78 and black.

Settings Panel:  This is a biggie.  If you have a fairly recent machine with a standard 17" or 19" monitor, chances are it came with a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024.  If you find yourself squinting at the tiny text on the monitor, this is why.  Grab the slider and move it down to the next standard notch, 1024 x 768.  Things will look GIGANTIC for a while, but this is the resolution most web sites are designed for and is really the proper resolution for a 17" or 19" monitor.  And you won’t find yourself squinting or leaning forward anymore.

Now click on the ‘Advanced’ button, then the ‘Monitor’ panel.  You’ll notice you probably have a couple of different ‘refresh rates’ to select from.  Move the box to the side and open a small window.  Grab it with the mouse and d-r-a-g it from side to side, watching for any trailing effects.  Now set the ‘refresh rate’ to the other extreme (if it was set to the highest, set it to the lowest, and vice versa), click ‘Apply’ and d-r-a-g the window again, watching for trailing artifacts.  One of the settings will probably be slightly better.  If neither appears to be, leave it on the highest setting.
 

Folder Options

General Panel:  Personally, I think the single-window system is really goofy and set both of the top options to the second setting.

View Panel:  Check "Show hidden files", uncheck "Hide extensions", "Hide protected", "Show pop-up".
 

Keyboard

For some reason, they switched these two settings around in XP.  Try moving the top slider all the way to the right and put the second slider right in the middle.  You can test it down below.
 

Mouse

Click on ‘Pointer Options’ panel.  (sometimes mouse driver companies change the headings on the panels; you’re looking for the panel with the ‘pointer speed’ on it)

In theory, you should be able to close your eyes, move the mouse to what you think is a designated spot, and that’s where the point should be.  If you go too far or not far enough, adjust the ‘pointer speed’ a notch.
 

Power Options

I set both to an hour.  If it’s a laptop, make them 5 minutes.  Click on the ‘Hibernate’ panel and make sure it’s off.
 

Scheduled Tasks

This should be empty except for the ‘Add’ icon, unless you specifically want something running at a predesignated time.
  

Sounds and Audio Devices

If you don’t use the volume control in the SysTray, you can get rid of it here.

Click on the ‘Sounds’ tab and you can change or eliminate the Windows sounds.  The one you’ll definitely want to get rid of is the ‘Exclamation’.  And that audible ‘click’ when you go to a web site is pretty lame; that’s "Start Navigation".  Others that you don’t use, like the ones for Windows Messenger, should be eliminated just cuz.

When you’re finished, click ‘Save As’ and save the settings.  Remember what I said earlier about Internet Exploder 8 exploding and displaying black tool bars?  The answer is to change the Windows ‘theme’ to a different theme and back.  The trouble is, it’ll wipe out your sound panel settings and put everything back to stock, so that’s when you’ll want to be able to re-load your saved settings.
 

System

System Restore Panel:  Assuming you use (or plan to use) a proper image file backup system, turn this off.  It’s a big resource hog.

Advanced Panel:  If you want a snappy system, click on "Settings", uncheck anything that starts with "Animate", "Fade" or "Slide", and the "Use visual styles" at the bottom.  I said earlier that a few of these tweaks will make a substantial difference as to the ‘quickness’ of your system.  This panel is it, and especially the last item.

Hardware Panel:  Click on ‘Device Manager’.  This is one of the more important panels on the computer, so remember where it is.  This is how you disable balky devices, update drivers, and it’ll show you if a device isn’t happy, usually because it’s missing a driver.  Right-clicking on the balky device will give you a shot at updating the driver automatically online.  If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to go to the manufacturer’s site, download the driver and direct the ‘Update driver’ procedure to it.
 

Taskbar and Start Menu

Having the Task Bar constantly display is great for the first-timer, but by now I think you’ve got a pretty good idea where it is.  If so, tell it to auto-hide when not in use.  I, personally, don’t like the ‘Group’ feature so I turn it off, and I don’t use the Quick Launch area so that goes off.

Click on the ‘Start Menu’ tab.  Personally, I think the stock XP menu is an awful design.  It’s much quicker to use the ‘classic’ style of Win95 and 98.  If you want to give it a spin, click on ‘Classic Start Menu’ and open ‘Customize’.  Down at the bottom, check "Show small icons" and uncheck "Use Personalized".  OK, OK, then check out the Start Menu and see what you think.  Remember that this whole area can be organized however you like.

In my case, I see a bunch of different categories, like "Audio", "Games", "Graphics", "Net", "Tools" and "Video".  Inside each of those are the proper programs.  There aren’t any pesky folders to paw through and nothing’s in the ‘Programs’ part except the stock Windows stuff.
 

Okay, that’s it for the Control Panel.  There are a few other possibly valuable settings stuffed in there.  Add/Remove is how you uninstall programs.  Security Center has your Windows Updates and similar settings.  User Accounts is where you change or add a password.
 

The Internet

Next up, let’s make sure your Internet settings are up to speed.  XP is kind of odd in this area, because while broadband was making inroads back when XP was being written, it was still "on the horizon" for most folks, and broadband protocols weren’t firmly established at the time, so the XP designers just had to guess in a few instances.  We’ll run two small files that’ll make sure everything’s set for max bandwidth.

Go here.  At the top of the sidebar, hover over ‘Broadband’, then select ‘Downloads/Patches’.  Skip down the page and download "sguide tweak 2k.zip", assuming you’re running Windows 2000 or XP.  That’s the one that resets Windows to meet broadband standards.  Now skip down the page to the "Web Patches" section.  Grab the second one, the one for Win 2000 and XP.

Unzip both files, run them, reboot.
 

Kill Windows Messenger

Unless you use it, you want to kill this baby dead, not just disable it.  It’s a classic ‘open port’ for outside hackers.  Do the following:

• Open Notepad.  Browse to the C Drive, ‘Windows’ folder, then the ‘inf’ folder.  If you don’t see the ‘inf’ folder, go to the Tools menu in any window, open ‘Folder Options’, ‘View’ tab, then check the "Show hidden files and folders" gadget.
   
• Open "sysoc.inf".  Look for the line that starts with "msmsgs=".  Delete the word "hide" but leave the commas.  Save the file.
   
• Open Control Panel, ‘Add or remove programs’, then click on the ‘Add/Remove Windows Components’ button on the left.  At the bottom you’ll see two ‘Windows Messenger’ entries.  Only uncheck the bottom one, OK.  It’s confusing but that’s how you do it.  When you open the "Windows Components" box again, both Windows Messenger boxes should be unchecked.
   

TweakUI

General: If you’re going for a snappy system, turn off ‘Enable tooltip fade’.

Mouse: This is the speed of the Start Menu.  Set it to "Fast".

Explorer: Uncheck "Prefix shortcut to".

Taskbar: Uncheck both.

My Computer:  Uncheck "Files Stored" if you don’t want the shared folders showing in the My Computer folder.  When it comes to the Control Panel icon, I leave it in if I have an odd number of devices in My Computer, just so the rows are even.

My Computer/Control Panel:  In case you want to get rid of any icons on the Control Panel.  It won’t interfere with the function of the actual program.

My Computer/Templates:  Most of these should be unchecked.  Only the things that you might really want a new one of, such as a Notepad document, should be selected.  You can also write up ‘master’ MS Word, Wordpad, HTML, etc, files with your own personalized touches and "Create" new entries, or overwrite the existing ones.  In the future, when you open a new MS Word document, for example, it’ll already have all of your custom features, such as page spacing, margins, size & type of fonts, etc.

Control Panel:  This is how to get rid of icons in the Control Panel.  It won’t affect the operation of the programs.

Logon: If you’re using a password and not logging on automatically, you can do it here.

Repair:  If some standard icon isn’t right, like maybe a disc icon got ‘stuck’ in the ROM drive’s place on the Control Panel, this will usually fix things.

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I’m drawing a line across the page because the following two tweaks are only if you’re serious about squeezing every last bit of performance out of your machine.
 

Services

Like programs run pre-loaders, Windows runs a lot of ‘services’ while booting up, many of which you don’t need and don’t do any good running in the background.  Others you might actually need now and then, but there’s no reason to have them start up automatically.  They’ll start up when you need them.

Open Control Panel, Administrative Services, ‘Services’.  Open it up to full-screen size.

What we do is first use the computer for a while, getting online, opening programs for a sec, just to get the ‘normal’ services in gear.

Then sort the entries by "Column Type" and do this:

• For those that are started and say ‘Manual’, set them to ‘Automatic’.
   
• For those that say ‘Automatic’ but aren’t started, set them to ‘Manual’.
   
• If you’re not using System Restore, set it to ‘Disabled’.

If you’ve been doing a lot of the tweaks on this page, it’s possible you’ve fired up some services that normally wouldn’t be run, so if you’re trying to do this 100% correctly, reboot, then run your main programs, get online, etc, then check the Services panel again.
 

Registry Tweaks

The ‘Registry’ is a series of immensely long text files that contain every shred of information on the system.  It’s also the only way to access certain settings.  Here’s what I do to a new XP system.

Start Menu, ‘Run’, fire up "regedit".

Turn off core indexing:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Control
PriorityControl
Set "Win32PrioritySeparation" to 26.

Put more core files into memory:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Control
Session Manager
Memory Management
Change ‘DisablePagingExecutive’ to 1
Change ‘LargeSystemCache’ to 1

Faster boot-up:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Control
SessionManager
MemoryManagement
PrefetchParameters
Change ‘EnablePrefetcher’ to ’5′.

Reboot for the changes to take effect.  You probably won’t notice anything, but a friend of mine said the second Registry tweak made a big difference with some operation he was doing.  So, you never can tell.