I have just found a site with some useful speed tweaks all displayed on one page for quick access.
It is the most useful page for tweaks I have come across.

http://www.pccallouts.co.uk/freetutorials.html

It covers 18 Windows XP Speed Tweaks.

They include:

1. Remove/Replace Windows Background image
2. Edit Boot.ini to disable GUI boot
3. Disk Cleanup
4. Disk Defragmenter
5. Visual Performance
6. Windows Explorer Performance
7. Applications Autorunning on Startup
8. Cleaning the Windows Registry
9. Remove viruses, trojans and spyware
10. Apply Windows updates
11. Disable performance counters
12. Optimize your internet connection
13. Remove windows fonts
14. Disabling indexing service
15. Turning off system restore
16. Speed up boot sequence
17. Disable unnecessary services
18. Setting manual IP addresses

Thanks, even though I half 1/2 of these done already, I can still try the others. Clearing items from the startup was definetly the biggest helper to me so far.

Done most of them and some arent worth doing. Nice page for someone after they refomatted though.

"9. Remove viruses, trojans and spyware"

Ya think --->

1. What are you running? A Pentium 1 with 64 Megs ram?

If your performance is crippled by such a low quality and simple image, I would look elsewhere for speed improvements.

2. How much time do you spend booting your system? The animated startup logo is a helpful screen that lets you know nothing bad has happened. This has no impact on actual system speed.

3.
Disk cleanup is a good idea, but isn't really a speed tweak.

4.
Disk defragmenting is a good tip.

5.
Turning down the visual in XP is more of a preferences thing than speed thing, unless your system is way too under powered anyway.

6.
This "tweak" may not apply in many situations, and may even be another personal preference tweak.

7.
I'm actually a big fan of "MSConfig -> Disable All". This is actually one of the best "speed tweaks" listed. It has the power to make system performance change like night and day. Unfortunately, it may also be one of the more confusing and possibly harmful tweaks.

8.
There has been a lot of talk on if cleaning your registry is a good thing. If there is some issue in the registry where a bad key is causing some sort of conflict and slow down, then cleaning it may help. In most other situations, cleaning out old keys will not give any speed increase.

9.
This one is silly. It should be done all the time. Those who allow their system to be overran with crap like this probably wont have the smarts needed to do anything else on the list.

10.
Another silly one. Windows should always be kept up to date. Anyone who skips this, again, doesn't have the smarts for anything else on the list.

11.
Performance counters shouldn't have any noticeable speed hit on the system. Disabling them may make troubleshooting something difficult later.

12.
Now here is a great way to break something. If you don't know how to keep your system clean of viruses and never run Windows Updates, I don't think messing with TCP/IP settings is the thing to do.

13.
Remove FONTS? What is this guide for? Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x??? Just like the "remove your wallpaper" option, this is a silly "tweak". If your system speed is being brought down by having too many fonts, you should look at upgrading your system. Unless you have 500 or more fonts, I wouldn't even worry about this.

14.
Turning off indexing is something I do anyway. This is somewhat of a tiny speed tweak, as it may be a useless feature to many people.

15.
Again, turning off System Restore is something I do anyway. I can recover from any error though. If you're someone who doesn't know how to handle malware or update Windows, you probably aren't someone who is good at recovering from system crashes or re-installations of Windows.
Yes, it may be a speed tweak to turn this off, but it may leave some people defenseless against fatal system issues.
I don't like System Restore, but I've lost count of how many times I've read about other people "rolling back" with it to get their system working again.

16.
Oh look, another boot tweak.

17.
Oh god, another "disable un-needed services" guide.
Those are there for a reason. You may not use them all, but you may run into an issue because one is disabled. Unless you KNOW what you are disabling, you shouldn't follow some random person's "guide" telling you to turn things off.
If your system is choking on basic Windows services, then you need to jump start your computer and get it out of the 1990s. Add some RAM.

18.
No, don't set your IP to static unless you know what you're doing. Issues with this pop up when you try to use an IP someone else is already using, or you have a different network setup than the person writing this "guide", or if your system is mobile and changes networks.
A system getting an IP takes about *zero* time. Windows 9x use to suffer from a 60-second time out, but nothing has had this issue since.
This is one of the crappiest "speed tweaks" I've seen.


If you follow this guide word for word, good luck to you. Just don't ask anyone else for help if something goes wrong.

Having an off day are we? lol

Well none of this is news to me... I've already done all of them... Except the fonts...

lmao at Xenomorph's comments.

As for the answer to your pc spec question.

I have a e6600, 320mb 8800gts, 2gb kingston value ram, 250gb sata 16mb hd, asus p5b mobo, lg 19inch widescreen

The reason for me to optimize xp is to play the latest games on my pc with the highest fps without having to upgrade.

Paid £180 for a new graphics card and £150 for e6600 in may 07 and now much better hardware is out for alot less + a bit skint.

Crysis only works at high fps on medium settings.

All other games call of duty 4, MOH airborne, need for speed prostreet, pro evo soccer 2008, elder scrolls oblivion and others work on max settings.

I can always overclock e6600 to 3.0ghz only prob is pc becomes noisy as i prefer the silence on an antec sonata II case with arctic freezer 7 fan.

Useless kingston value ram means that no overclocking over 3.0ghz as it runs very hot and not stable, will upgrade but not for a while yet.

This is where these tweaks were very useful for me in increasing pc performance without paying a penny.

Btw, the link for the site I posted seems to have changed for some odd reason.

It now contains 26 speed tweaks even better lol:

Just tried the nLite tweak and its amazing what you can mess around with.

http://www.pccallouts.co.uk/freexpspeedtweaks.html

I have one tip: #1 Install more RAM.

Thanks for the link jack3.
Seems to be a very in depth page of tweaks.
Will need a while to dig through it.
41 tweaks is the highest ive seen yet.
Not sure about the quality, will post later.

Yeah a lot of ppl dont realise that, the amount of computers ive looked at with hardly any ram is mad, the past week ive looked at 2 computers with less than 256mbs of ram

Well, I was playing around using a couple of those tips, however when I restarted, my desktop icons were out of order. When I fixed them and restarted, they were out of order again. How can I fix this? The only things I changed were in that link.

I believe this is all I changed:

-Disable performance counters
-Load menus faster
-Shutdown XP faster
-Optimize your internet connection
-Reduce Applications Autorunning on Startup
-Cleaning the Windows Registry
-Remove junk files and shrink registry
-Defragment Windows Page File (Don't believe this actually worked)
-Turning off system restore (Just shrunk the size)

There may have been more, but I believe thats all I changed.

thanks!

do a google search for a desktop icon saving program, when you mess around with resolution and crap a lot they get out of order and it's annoying, but with a program i've seen before (can't think of name) you can save your desktop state or load it with 2 clicks. search it! =D

1. Upgrade to Windows Vista

Speed up Windows XP boot time

One of the simplest and most easy ways to speed up Windows XP boot times is by slightly changing the parameters of prefetching. Windows XP is set to prefetch and cache both boot and application data on startup. By simply changing this to boot files only, you can speed up (sometimes significantly) the boot time for windows XP.

Step 1) Run regedit and navigate to HKLM->System->CurrentControlSet->Control->Session Manager->Memory Management->Prefetch Paramaters


The entry we are concerned about is EnablePrefetcher (which is highlighted above). Notice that it is set to 3. This is standard for MOST default installs of Windows XP. The different settings for the prefetcher are as follows:

* 0 = Disabled
* 1 = Application Launch Prefetch
* 2 = Boot Prefetch
* 3 = Application and Boot Prefetch

For speed of booting, we want to set this parameter to 2. So double click the entry.

Change the Value data from 3 to 2 and click ok.

Step 2) Once you’ve done that, you should go clean out your prefetch folder. This is locate at *C:\windows\prefetch*

*note* My windows installation was on the C:\ drive, yours could be different.

Just select everything in this folder and delete it all. This clears all the old prefetch data that your computer had.

Step 3) Reboot your computer. *NOTE* You will probably not notice a faster boot up time the first time you reboot. In fact, it may even be slower. This is due to the fact that since you cleaned out your prefetch folder, so Windows has to effectively “learn” what files to prefetch again. But subsequent reboots should be considerably faster.





Right click on the desktop and you will see "Arrange Icons By --->"

changing the prefetch key is stupid as all it does is slow your app launch times,best to leave it alone.with vista you dont need to tweak it much(tune startups,turn off features you dont need)

thanks this really helped speed up my xp

thax.... very good ........

Most of these tweaks are pointless, or have a completely negligible impact on speed if you have something more powerful then a pentium II.

Disable your wallpaper/GUI boot? lol

It's a nice way for gamers to get an extra frame per hour.