If you have ever searched the Internet for solutions on how to solve slow XP performance and speed it up, you will get countless recommendations. But not all of them are useful exactly; some even mislead the PC users. As a XP user, I have reinstalled XP for many times and felt too deeply on speed up XP. Here, some advice will be given for all of you to avoid certain detours if trying to speed up XP.

1. Optimize XP startup performance
For all PC users, I think that they will be crazy if find the computer boot slow. So to solve slow Windows XP performance, first please optimize its startup performance. Please right click “My Computer”  to select “Properties” -> Advanced -> click “Settings” item within “Startup and Recovery”  tab -> here, please uncheck the two tabs within “System Startup”. But if you have more than one operating system, remember to check the item “Time to display list of operating systems”.

Then please go to  “Hardware”  within “System Properties”-> Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Here, please click “Primary IDE Channel”  to select “Advanced Settings”, and then change the transfer mode of  ”Current Transfer Mode”  from “Not Applicable”  to “”None”. Please repeat the steps above to modify the transfer mode of the “Secondary IDE Channel”. But if you are using VIA chip board, do not modify the item “VIA Bus Master IDE Controller”. In this way, the startup speed will be greatly increased and eventually speed up Windows XP.

2. Improve XP shutdown performance
To solve slow XP performance, how to improve its shutdown performance has been another important part as well. Now, you can go to Registry Editor and then locate the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER /ControlPanel/Desktop, and then change the value of “AutoEndTasks” to “1″ and both the value of “HungAppTimeout”  and “WaitTOKillService” to “2000″ or less than “2000″. With the simple modification here, you will greatly speed up your Windows XP at shutdown. Here, if you want to delay system menu, you can find the entry “MenuShowDelay”, and change its value as you like, for example, change it to “0″ if you want to cancel ” Menu Show Delay”.

With the two optimizations above, you will see an increase on the XP computer speed. But to my own experience, I want to say that there is not enough. To get a faster Windows XP, you need to regularly clean up the system junk files and then defragment the hard disk. These two simple steps can help you easily remove the system junk files and then effectively rearrange the files on your hard disk, reducing the movement of the hard disk read-write head and then speeding it up.

Above are some methods that I have improved from during the usage of XP computer to optimize XP performance. If you want to solve problem like slow Windows XP performance, please do remember to try the steps above and do not forget to defragment your computer regularly in order to speed up XP.