Windows XP® Tune-Up and Optimization Guide
This is a guide to tuning up your Windows XP® computer written by Tony Farrell, co-owner of aur Computer Service, on March 16, 2008 for the benefit of our Milwaukee area customers. It is provided as a guide only and does not include any support, warranty, or guarantee of results. Use the information contained within at your own risk. You are not allowed to reproduce this guide in any form without permission, however, you may place a link on your web site which leads to it. You must use http://www.aurcomputerservice.com/xptuneup.asp as the linking web address.
The primary purpose of a tune-up is to bring your computer current with security updates and optimize it to run faster, both of which are necessary regular maintenance in order to keep your computer running well all the time. Before performing a tune-up, the computer should be in generally working order and error-free, including not having any viruses and spyware. Also it needs to be connected to the internet in order to follow these steps.
In order to get your Windows XP® computer running faster, there are several steps we take:
- Clean out temporary files with CCleaner. CCleaner, available from http://www.ccleaner.com/ is a great free program for clearing out temporary files that may be bogging your system down. Download it, run it, and allow it to clean the temporary files on your computer. It should be run separately on each user login you have. Since it does not install icons on every user login, when you log in to windows as a different user, you can usually find it under My Computer->C:->Program Files->CCleaner.
- Remove heavyweight security programs. While Norton and McAfee are good programs that secure your computer well, they are also heavyweights that significantly slow your system down due to using so many system resources all the time. However, do not leave your computer unsecured! If you are a home user, consider using the combination of Windows Defender available from Microsoft for free from http://www.microsoft.com and AVG Free Edition available from http://free.grisoft.com. If you are a Milwaukee area business, you may consider CA Antivirus available for purchase and download from http://shop.ca.com and make sure you get only the antivirus product and skip the other internet security products.
- Update windows and security programs. Get all critical and service pack updates from http://www.windowsupdate.com, and update antivirus and antispyware programs using their builtin update functions. If you have Microsoft Office, then the crititcal updates and service packs for Microsoft Office are recommended too. Also, it is okay to install Internet Explorer 7.0 in almost all applications now. Make sure to go back and get updates over and over again until there are no more critical updates available.
- Tweak startup programs and memory usage. From the start menu, select Run... and type in msconfig and click [Ok]. This brings up a window which allows you to control what programs and windows components load on startup. You should use extra caution here, this can potentially cause some big problems if you are not sure of what you are doing. What you will want to do is click the [Startup] tab and uncheck the boxes next to programs you do not need to load on startup and have running all the time. Sometimes, you may want to disable all of them and then just re-enable the ones you need later, since you can just run msconfig again and re-enable them whenever you want.
- Check the internet cache size. In most cases, a good internet cache size is 250MB. However, on many computers it is set much larger than that, which can slow down your computer and especially internet browsing quite a bit, and too small a setting can also really slow down browsing. Go to Control Panel->Internet Options and look under browsing history settings (IE 7.0). Change it to 250MB.
- Cycle and throttle down system restore. System restore is good and can really help for system recovery in the case of hardware failure and other specialized cases, but the default of using 12% of your hard drive space to store hundreds of restore points is outrageously excessive and bogs your system down. Go to Control Panel->System->[System Restore] tab and turn off system restoreby checking the box and clicking [Apply]. Now wait a while as windows automatically deletes all the system restore points on your computer. Then uncheck the box and move the slider down to 0% or 1% and click [Apply].
- Defragment your hard drive. Excessive file fragmentation can definitely cause serious decrease in performance, which is seen more often now with hard drives quickly filling up with downloaded files, music, movies, and more. Go to My Computer, right click on the hard drive and choose properties. Click on the [Tools] tab and click on [Defragment Now...] and then [Defragment].
- Free up hard drive space on the drive containing Windows if needed. If you download so much music and movies that you run out of hard drive space on the hard drive windows is on, you're going to already know why it is a bad idea. It is recommended to have a secondary hard drive, either internal or external, on which to store all your media files and downloads, to prevent the primary drive with Windows from getting filled up too much. Generally you should always leave at least 20% of the total available space free on the windows drive, or your system may not perform so well anymore. If it's already too late, then get an external hard drive and move your large media files onto it, then defragment the drive containing Windows after enough space has been freed up.
That's it! You're Done! Follow those simple steps on a regular basis, and it will help ensure that your computer stays performing well all the time. Also, of course, you could always hire us to do it for you in the Milwaukee area. We'd be happy to help out.
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