The surefire way of improving the speed at which your personal computer operates is through upgrade of the hardware. But there are other ways to improve the personal computer. You can make changes on your Windows XP settings that shall noticeably improve your computer’s performance.

You can add some tweaks on your setting to have your Window XP speed boost up. One aspect that you might want to consider improving is start up. If your computer starts up immediately, you can start work quickly.

Whenever you install an application on your computer it uses system resources such as hard drive space, CPU power, and memory. By using an Add or Remove Programs, you can remove it from the startup sequence. Another simple tweak that helps is by deleting the shortcuts. This will prevent an application to from running automatically during start up but will still continue to use it.

Allocating memory is another simple tweak that will boost the speed of your computer. You can choose how the installed memory in Windows XP is utilized. By choosing the System Cache in your System Properties, a large portion of the computer’s memory will be used in the cache. This is ideal for those who use powerful graphics and video editing programs.

To make further improvement on the performance, you can tweak into this particular setting to run your disk faster. Select the Hardware tab in the System Properties, and then open the Device Manager. Locate the IDE ATAPI/ATA controllers and expand the tree. Under the Advanced Setting Tab, set the Transfer Mode to “DMA if available”. Repeat the process for the Secondary IDE Channel.

Remember, whenever you do some tweaking on your computer, reboot is the fastest way for a Windows XP speed check. A noticeable change can be seen even during the start up.

To improve Windows XP shutdown speed, change the registry entries of the MenuShowDelay controls, WaitToKillAppTimeout to 1000 under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and value of 1 for the “AlwaysUnloadDLL” under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer.

A small little program that uses large amounts of RAM called Indexing Services often makes a computer noisy and loud endlessly. It processes the updates of list and indexes that are on the computer. It makes the searching faster by scanning the index lists. Even if you do search often, this system is not necessary. You can disable the indexing services under the Control Panel/Add/Remove Programs.

By simply making use of the built in tools and settings of your computer, a system will go a lot faster than you are aware of.