Top 20 Tips To Keep Your System Faster
1. Wallpapers:
They slow
your whole system down, so if you're willing to compromise, have a basic plain
one instead!
2. Drivers:
Update your hardware drivers as frequently
as possible. New drivers tend to increase system speed especially in the case of
graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very frequently!
3.
Minimizing:
If you want to use several programs at the same time then minimize those you are
not using. This helps reduce the overload on RAM.
4. Boot
Faster:
The 'starting Windows 95/98' message on startup can delay your booting for a
couple of seconds. To get rid of this message go to c:\ and find the file
Msdos.sys. Remove the Read-Only option. Next, open it in Notepad or any
other text editor. Finally, go to the text 'Options' within the file and make
the following changes: Add BootDelay=0. To make your booting even faster,
set add Logo=0 to remove the Windows logo at startup.
5.
Restart only Windows:
When restarting your PC, hold down Shift to only restart Windows rather
than the whole system which will only take a fraction of the time.
6. Turn
Off Animations:
Go to Display Settings from the Control Panel and switch to the
Effects Tab. Now turn off Show Windows Content While Dragging and
Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts. This tip is also helpful with Windows XP
because of the various fade/scroll effects.
7.
Faster Start-Menu Access:
Go to the Start menu and select Run. Now type Regedit and
hit Enter. The Registry Editor will appear on the screen. Now, open the folder
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. You should see a
MenuShowDelay value. If you don't then do the following: right click on a
blank space in the right pane and select New\String. Change the name in
the new value to MenuShowDelay. Now that we have the MenuShowDelay
value, double click on it and enter 0 in the value data field. This sets
the start menu delay to 0 milliseconds.
8. Resolutions:
If you are
willing to do anything for faster performance from your PC, then try lowering
your display resolution. The lower it is, the faster your PC.
9. Turn
off Active Desktop:
Go to your Display Properties and switch to the Web tab. Uncheck
View My Active Desktop As a Web Page. Since the Active Desktop option
under Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources, this option can have a dramatic
effect on the speed of the whole system.
10.
Defragment Often:
Windows 98's Defrag tool uses Application Acceleration from Intel which
means that when you defragment your drive, data is physically arranged on the
drive so that applications will load faster.
11.
Take your PC to Bed:
Using the Advanced Power Management feature under Windows 98 gives you
the option to use the sleep command. That way, you can send your PC to sleep
instead of shutting it down and then restarting it. It's as simple as pressing a
button and then pressing the same button to wake it up. You can tell Windows
after how many minutes/hours of inactivity to automatically sleep the machine in
the Advanced Power Management section of the Control Panel.
12.
Faster Internet Access:
If you use the internet for reference and the sites you visit are rarely updated
then try the following. In IE (the same can be done in Netscape) go to Tools,
Internet Options. Next, click on Settings... in the Temporary
Internet Files section. Finally, select Never for the first option
and double the amount of storage space to use, click OK!
13.
Benchmarking:
Benchmarking can be very useful when run frequently. It can tell you how your
PC's components are performing and then compare them to other machines like
yours. For example, when you overclock your PC, you want to know how much more
speed you have and whether it is stable. All this and more can be discovered
using benchmarking. An excellent piece of software for doing this job is
SiSoft Sandra which can be found in the Downloads File Archive!
14.
Refresh the Taskbar without restarting:
If you in some way change the taskbar, either in Regedit or elsewhere, you can
refresh the task bar without restarting. Hold down Ctrl Alt Del,
and double click on Explorer. Say Yes to close Explorer, but no to
closing Windows. This will refresh the Taskbar and system tray.
15.
Quick CD Eject:
Instead of pushing the button on your drive, right-click your CD drive letter in
My Computer and click on Eject. This will also remove any icons that have
become associated with the CD drive.
16.
Start Up Programs:
Windows can be slowed down when programs run on start up. To eliminate this,
check your Start up folder. You can access it from the start menu: Start,
Programs, Start Up. Another way to eliminate programs from loading
even before Windows actually starts is by doing the following: Click on Start,
then Run. Type msconfig. It will take quite a long time for this
program to load, but when you finally see it on your screen, explore the
different tabs. They all have to do with how quickly your PC boots, so select
what you want, and uncheck what you don't want!
17.
Fonts:
When Windows starts, it loads every single font in the Fonts folder.
Therefore, the more fonts you have, the slower the booting process. To get rid
of unwanted fonts, simply go to the Fonts folder under c:\windows and remove
whatever you don't want. Fonts that have a red letter 'A' as their icon are
system fonts, so don't delete them.
18. Stretching Wallpapers:
Don't "stretch" your wallpaper in Windows 98 since it actually slows Windows
down when you drag icons around on the desktop.
19. RAM
Matters:
If you have less than 32MB then you should seriously think of upgrading it to at
least 64MB. Windows runs much more smoothly with 64MB or higher and tends to use
less hard disk space for virtual memory.
20.
Partitioning:
A very nice little thing you can do to boost system performance. By partitioning
your hard drive, splitting one physical drive into several logical ones, you can
gain several advantages. 1. If you get a virus or you accidentally format a
drive, not all will be lost. 2. By placing the swap file (Win386.swp) on a
separate drive, The swap file will be less fragmented and thus, faster. 3. Place
Windows on a separate drive and whenever you need to reinstall it, you rest
assured that your data is safe on a separate drive. Partitioning can be done
using a few programs such as FDisk which comes with DOS. However, FDisk formats
everything on the hard disk before partitioning. Alternatively, you can use
Partition Magic from Power Quest to partition your hard disk without losing your
data.