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As Brandon mentioned in his post about retrofitting your old laptop, there are many things that can be done to speed it up. I use all of these tips to make my Dell Inspiron 8200 run as fast as possible. All of the tips that are going to be mentioned in this post require no additional software and can be done by any Windows XP user who has admin rights on their desktop or laptop.

Startup Programs

The first tip to speeding up your machine is to remove any non necessary programs from loading at startup. Doing this will help speed up the process of restarting Windows. The less programs that Windows has to load at startup will increase system resources that can be used for other startup tasks. This can be done by clicking on the stat button and clicking Run. Once the prompt is open type msconfig and press enter or click OK.

This will bring up a window that has tabs: General, System.INI, Win.INI, Boot.INI, Services, and Startup. You will want to click on the Startup tab, this will show you all of the programs that are available to start when Windows loads. On my laptop you’ll see I only have 6 programs that start with Windows. To help determine if you can remove a program and not cause any serious problem you can drag the part that says Command to see the full path of where to find the program starting.

Paging

The Second tip is changing your Page File size. The page file is used by the operating system in this case Windows XP when space has run out on your RAM so it starts creating the Page File on your hard drive. The Page File is used similar to space on RAM in that it helps load programs that are used more frequently faster. To change the Page File size you need to go to the Control Panel (Start – Control Panel or My Computer – Control Panel).

Once in the Control Panel you’ll click the System icon. It will bring up a window that has the tabs: General, Computer Name, Hardware, Advanced, System Restore, Automatic Updates, and Remote. Click on the Advanced tab.

On the Advanced tab you’ll see a section called Performance click on the button labeled settings. The next window that displays defaults to the Visual Effects tab and you’ll see two other tabs Advanced and Data Execution Prevention. Click on the Advanced tab.

You should see a section titled Virtual Memory. Click on the button in that section labeled Change. This is the screen where you’ll be able to change your Paging File properties. You should leave it to the default where the system will manage it if your uncomfortable with tuning your operating system.

Defragmenting

The last tip to speed up an old machine for this post is to Defragment. This will compress your hard drive so that all of the information on it will be as close together as possible. Defraging can help speed up larger drives where data can be fragmented Gigabits apart. To Defrag all you have to do is click the My Computer icon. Once the My Computer window is open right click on the drive you want to defrag, in my case its my C Drive. After Right clicking, mouse down to Properties and select it. The next window has the tabs: General, Tools, Hardware, Sharing, and Quota. Click on the Tools tab and select Defragment Now button in the Defragmentation section. Once the Defrag tool is open you can click on the Analyze button to see if Windows recommends you Defrag.

Hopefully you’ll find some of these tips useful in speeding up your machine. There will be more tips for tuning your PC in the days to come, so stay tuned. If you found any of these tips useful or a complete waste of time leave a comment.