By its very nature, over a period of time the Windows operating system accumulates a lot of clutter, and as a consequence suffers from sluggishness. The purpose of this tutorial is to set out several steps that can be taken which will improve system performance. The article has been written from the perspective of Windows XP, but the principles should be similar in Vista, or Windows 2000.
1) TAKE OUT THE TRASHIt is a good idea to get into the habit of having a regular clean up. This can be done by using either Windows’ inbuilt Disk Cleanup utility, or by using the superior
Ccleaner. Once installed, the default settings in Ccleaner are fine, but if you are confident that Windows is working OK, you can tick the option to scourge windows ‘Hotfix Uninstallers’.
2) FREE UP SOME SPACEThere are several things you can do here. Firstly consider uninstalling any applications that you never use, via Control Panel / Add or Remove Programs. Only uninstall anything you are absolutely sure you don’t want (or that you have the installation files for). If in doubt leave it alone.
Secondly, you can free up a bit of space by reducing the amount set aside for System Restore and the Recycle Bin. By default, Windows reserves 12% and 10% of your C: drive for these. In my opinion 2GB for either option should be ample. [System Restore can be turned off altogether, but only do this if you are a very experienced (and confident) Windows user.]
For system restore, right-click on My Computer / Properties / System Restore tab - highlight C: and click on settings - move the slider down to 6% (or whatever). OK it. For the re-cycle bin, right-click on the recycle bin icon and adjust the slider accordingly (this can be done to a global setting, or individually if you have more than one drive or partition). OK it.
3) TIDY UPFirstly, if you have a spare partition or second hard drive, consider moving the My Documents folder to it. This can be done in several ways. Probably the easiest is to right-click on My Documents icon, choose ‘properties’, then changing the ‘target’, to e.g. D:\. If you have a lot of documents this may take some time to do, so go and make a cup of tea.
TweakUI also has several options under Desktop / My Computer / Special Folders.
The other main tidy up procedure is to defragment your hard drive(s). Windows does have a habit of scattering bits of the same file all over the place. Think of it as being like your DVD shelf. You might have a whole series of disks that form a particular set. If they are not all adjacent to each other, it takes time to find all the parts. The act of defragmenting will not only bring stuff together, but will also attempt to amalgamate the free space. You can use either Windows own disk defragmenter tool, or third party software such as
Diskeeper Lite, or
Defraggler. Defragmenting should be carried out after any major clean up exercise, or after installing new software, or major updates.
4) PERFORMANCE TWEAKSThere are many tweaks you can make to improve the overall performance to your system, but instead of listing them here, I would recommend that you take the time to look at one of the excellent
guides written by Koroush Ghazi.
Happy housekeeping.