Adjust Visual Settings
You can increase the performance of your computer by sacri?cing some visual effects in Windows XP.These effects include items such as shadowing, smoothing, and fading of fonts, menus, and your cursor.
Here is how to change these visual effect settings:
1. Right-click My Computer and click Properties, as seen in
in the figure 1 below:
2. Click [...]
To use Disk Cleanup, follow these steps:
1. Choose Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Cleanup. (In Windows XP, it’s All Programs rather than Programs.) A dialog box appears from which to select a drive; the default is C.
2. Select the hard drive to clean up from the list (or leave C: selected) and click OK. The program analyzes your [...]
Are you running low on hard disk space? These days, anything less than 300 megabytes free is considered “running low.” When your hard disk is full, you can’t install more programs, and certain Windows features such as virtual memory might not work to their full potential. You may also experience problems running certain programs, or [...]
Hardware companies periodically release updates and improvements for their devices’ Windows drivers. These updates can not only fix problems,but can in some cases make the device work better or have additional capabilities. The same goes for software. Depending on the program, you might be able to download a patch that fixes a specific problem or [...]
When you defragment, a special program rearranges the content of your
hard disk so that all files are stored in sequential clusters. That way, when
you open the files, the disk read/write head reads from a single spot rather
than having to hop around, so it can read faster.
Therefore, for best performance, you should defragment your disk regu-
larly [...]
If you are trying to track down a pesky unwanted program that loads at startup,
and it’s not in the Startup program group or the win.ini file, where is it
being calledfrom? Probably the Windows Registry.
The Registry is a giant configuration file that Windows processes at startup, telling it what to load, what
settings to use, and so [...]
