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Do you want to speed up the performance of your Windows XP Home or Professional Editions? Here's another in a series of Windows XP Speed Tips.
Windows XP comes with a lot of new colors, sliding menus, animations and other visual enhancements that differentiate it from preceding operating systems such as Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Unfortunately, all that eye-candy comes with a price in the form of decreased performance of your computer. This is particularly true if you upgraded an older computer with less than 128 megabytes of RAM to run Windows XP.
Here's how you can regain some system performance on an older computer and even late model computers that run Windows XP.
1. Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Properties" from the resulting menu. This will display the "System Properties" dialog window.
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2. Select the "Advanced" tab and click the "Settings" butoon in the "Performance" section. This will display the "Performance Options" dialog window.
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3. While you can leave the "Let Windows choose what's best" radio button checked, you'll find that you'll squeeze more performance by selecting one of the other three radio button selections instead. If you want to go for the gusto and get the best speed from your RAM starved computer, or further enhance the performance of your late-model speed demon, then select the "Adjust for best performance" radio button instead.
4. Click the "Ok" button to register your changes on the "Performance Options" dialog window and then click "Ok" on the "System Properties" dialog window.
There! Now your RAM starved Windows XP computer will run and perform slightly faster because it won't have to invoke all of those fancy eye-candy operations.
Enjoy!
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