Registry Clean and Repair

Here are a few tips to get more performance and life out of your Windows XP computer.

Run Regular Scans

To keep your XP performance high, you should run on a regular basis (at least once per week) the following: virus scanner, spyware scanner and registry scanner.

For the virus scan, you can get a free one called AVG. For anti-spyware, the best out there is called Spybot. Finally, for registry scanning and cleaning we recommend Reg Easy – you can get a free scan right now here:

Defragment

Yes, this is age old advice and a well known XP performance tweak but it is true. Make sure that your hard drive is defragmented. You need only run this program once per month.

Some people like to defragment daily but in my opinion, this is risky. If you get a power interruption during a defragmentation then it can totally corrupt your installation of Windows. So if you run a scan (needlessly) daily then you run a much higher risk of this and you gain nothing from it.

Disable Startup Programs

Is your PC especially slow to load up? Do you notice all kinds of programs loading up at startup? One way to speed up your PC is to get rid of many of these useless programs.

You can disable them by going to Start, Run, msconfig. Now go to the “Startup” tab and you can select and deselect programs as you wish. This will give you a superior and faster pc startup. It’s amazing how many pesky programs that you barely ever use like to reside in your memory anyway.

Registry Hacks To Speed Up XP

There are also a few reg hacks you can try here. I must warn you that if you are not comfortable editing the registry then don’t attempt to try these hacks. Instead, use a free registry scan like this one.

Speed Up Shutdown

This is a tiny tweak but could be really useful for you. Often, when your Windows XP PC becomes really slow over time, it also takes forever to shut down. This can be annoying if you need to leave the house right away but are waiting 5 minutes to make sure your PC is switched off.

Instead you can do this.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del. Click the Shut Down menu and then hover your mouse over “Turn Off”. Before you click it, make sure that you are first holding down the Ctrl button.

When you do it this way you will experience a much quicker shutdown that is still absolutely safe to do.