In this article, I'll explain how you can get your machine back up to speed when it starts slowing down. We'll assume you're running windows XP, since it's still the most used Operating System.

In 20+ years, I've honed my techniques down to an art form. With a few simple tweaks, and sometimes, a little more ram, most machines can perform much better than they would otherwise. Lets get started on speeding up that old clunker.

The first thing I always do is the easiest thing on the list. It's using a little tool called "Tune XP". First, download Tune XP from the following URL: http://www.download.com/TuneXP /3640-2086_4-10290928. html . After installing the tool, run it. Under the Memory and File System menu, enable the following options: Faster Shutdown, File Allocation Size Tweak, Optimize prefetch, and Increase NTFS performance. Also, in the same menu, set the "IO Lock Limit" to the amount of ram that you have in your system. Under the hardware menu, enable all of the options.

Now, download pagedefrag from the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/techn et/sysinternals/Utilit ies/PageDefrag.mspx
Unzip the file into a temp folder and run it. Choose the option to defrag the page file on every reboot. Once it's defragged, it won't take any time at all to defrag. This file defrags the page file and parts of the registry that a normal defrag cannot defragment.

The next thing to do is to remove unnecessary startup items under your startup folders. The easiest way to do this is to click on start, then run, then type MSCONFIG and hit enter. Go to the startup tab and uncheck anything that is unnecessary. Typical things to remove is ctfmon, anything acrobat or adobe, anything associated with wildtangent, real, or java. Removing these things will not disable functionality, but will cause the individual programs not to start as fast. Usually the tradeoff is not worth it because these programs are not ran frequently enough. Other items in the startup should be typed into GOOGLE and look if other people are disabling it in startup or not.

Next go to the control panel and then "add/remove programs" and remove programs that you know you don't use. Don't remove anything you're not sure what it is-regardless of what it says in the "Last used" column of the add/remove programs control panel. Click "no" if it asks you if you want to reboot.

Now, right-click on my computer, go to Properties, then go to the advanced tab and click on "settings" under "performance".

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