99 ways to make your computer blazingly fast
Over the past few years working in IT companies as a system administrator, network administrator and help desk professional, I wrote and learned many ways to improve performance not only on my PC, but also many my network equipment from Windows 98 to Windows Vista.
In this article I hope to compile a complete list of all the different methods and tricks that I used to get the last bit of juice from a slow PC. If you use an old PC or the latest and greatest hardware, you can still use some of them to make your PC run faster.
Note that since I write two blogs, and online Help Desk Geek Tech Tips, I wrote previously about the performance that much advice, I will return all the links. If I have not written about it, I throw in a link from an article by some of my favorite sites. This list is in no particular order, just write in order that I think of them.
There are probably a lot of adjustments and high performance hacks I’ve lost here, please chime in with comments! Enjoy!
1. Defragment your computer hard disk using free tools like SmartDefrag.
2. You should also defragment your Windows pagefile and registry.
3. Clean up hard drive disk space being taken up by temporary files, the recycle bin, hibernation and more. You can also use a tool like TreeSize to determine what is taking up space on your hard drive.
4. Load up Windows faster by using Startup Delayer, a free program that will speed up the boot time of Windows by delaying the startup of programs.
5. Speaking of startup programs, many of them are useless and can be turned off. Use the MSCONFIG utility to disable startup programs.
6. By default, the size of the paging file is controlled by Windows, which can cause defragmentation. Also, the paging file should be on a different hard drive or partition than the boot partition. Read here on the rules for best paging file performance.
7. In Windows XP and Vista, the Windows Search indexing service is turned on for all local hard drives. Turning off indexing is a simple way to increase performance.
8. If you don’t care about all the fancy visual effects in Windows, you can turn them off by going to Performance Options.
9. You can optimize the Windows boot time using a free program called Bootvis from Microsoft.
10. Clean your registry by removing broken shortcuts, missing shared DLLs, invalid paths, invalid installer references and more. Read about the 10 best and free registry cleaners.
