Currently, Windows XP has been the mainstream operating system. But no matter how wonderful your hardware configuration is, you will find that your computer is gradually running slower then even before. Upon this, it is necessary for you to master some skills on how to effectively speed up your windows XP. Generally speaking, we can effort from two sides below in our daily life to speed up the XP computer: speed up startup and shutdown time.

Speed up computer at startup. The effectively way to speed up the computer at startup is to disable some entries which do not need to automatically load at windows startup. To disable some unnecessary services, you can simply follow: go to Start -> Run -> type “services.msc” to access that service page. Here, you can select the programs that do not need to automatically run when booting up the computer. But, please note that it is not recommended to disable the anti-virus program because of the real-time safeguard to the computer. Another way is to modify the registry to reduce the pre-reading, thus will reduce the waiting time of the progress bar, making it only run a lap on the progress bar and then into the login screen. You can go to Start → Run → type regedit to open Registry Editor, find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters. Here, please select the key EnablePrefetcher and then change its value to “1″.

Speed up computer at shutdown. Normally, it will take more time to shut down the computer, especially when there are some tasks needs to be manually turned off, which will delay the shutdown time. So in order to speed up the shutdown speed, first it is necessary to turn on the windows XP Auto EndTasks function: go to Start → Run → type regedit to open Registry Editor, find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, and change the value of AutoEndTaks to “1”, the value of HungAppTimeout to “4000” or less 4000. Last, please go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\, change the value of the WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 4000. After the above settings, it will become relatively faster when shutting up the computer, significantly speed up computer.

Moreover, to speed up your windows XP computer, a lose weight of the computer is necessary. For more detailed information, you can visit here for more helpful tips. With the above methods above, I believe you can greatly speed up your computer, making it always run at maximum performance.

By the way, as we all know that no matter in which way the computer is running, there will be inevitably some fragments occur. The more fragmented the computer is, the more time it will take when running the computer/programs or taking other actions on the computer. So a very simplest way to speed up your windows XP is to regularly run a disk defragmentation by going to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools and then Disk Defragmenter to select the drives to begin the defragment process, making the same/similar files always locate at a single directory of the hard disk, reducing the accessing time and then speeding up the computer.

But here, to speed up your computer by a disk defragmentation, I recommend you to use Advanced Defrag because of its advanced defragment technology and algorithm, compared with the stubborn Microsoft Windows defragmenter. Believe me, it will return you a faster Windows XP computer which runs like new.