Top 20 Tips To Keep Your System Faster
Follow these tips and you will definitely have a much faster and more
reliable PC! Most of the below tips works for windows 98
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_USERControl PanelDesktop.
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 NewString.
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.
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