Okay, I know that Windows XP has some pretty nifty-looking desktop animations and effects. Menus fade, buttons slide, contents are shown while dragging and buttons even have shadows. In fact, when your system is set to "best appearance" it indeed looks good.
Unfortunately, it also runs like a stuffed pig.
You can do something about this - you can turn off all of the neat special effects. If you are anything like me, you don't really care anyway - you are just trying to use the computer to do something, not impress he friends.
How do you turn it all off? Click "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel" then "System". Click the "Advanced" tab, then click the Performance" button. Now select the "Visual Effects" tab. Click "Adjust for best performance" to turn everything off, then, if you want, select just the one or two things that you desire (I like to set "Use common tasks in folders myself".) You will notice an immediate speed improvement.
Windows XP ships with a Desktop Themes service which makes possible a really slick-looking interface. It's nice and it's very configurable. Again, as with the other cool special effects, it makes your system run like a stuffed pig. In fact, I found that turning off this Themes service did more for performance improvements than anything else.
How do you
turn off Themes? Select "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel",
"Administrative Tools" and "Services" to start the "Services" applet.
Scroll down to the "Themes" service, select the line and right click.
Select "Stop" from the menu to stop the service immediately. Once it
stops, right-click again and select "Properties". Click on "Startup type"
and change it to "Manual".
Click OK to save your changes.
Desktop Themes will now be turned off. You should notice an immediate and quite dramatic performance boost.
The Index Service is a great idea with a really poor implementation. The concept is that every once in a while this service will scan your entire system to build an index, so that when you do searches of your hard drive information can be found quickly. The problem is (a) I don't do that many searches of my hard drive and (b) indexing service really slows things down when it is running. Thus, I highly recommend that it be disabled, unless, of course, you like the feature.
Select "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel", "Administrative Tools" and "Services" to start the "Services" applet. Scroll down to the "Indexing Serivice" service, select the line and right click. Select "Stop" from the menu to stop the service immediately. Once it stops, right-click again and select "Properties". Click on "Startup type" and change it to "Disabled".
Click OK to save your changes.
The
concept behind system restore is a good one. It creates "restore points"
so you can roll back changes to your system. This is useful, for example,
if you install some software which causes applications to crash or somehow
interferes with something else. It would have been very, very useful on
Windows 95 or 98, but on the very stable Windows XP platform, it's
probably overkill for most people.
Now before you go turning this off, you have to ask yourself if you desire the feature. If you are in the process of installing new hardware, tweaking the registry or doing other similar types of changes, this is probably a useful service to have. Personally, if I destroy my system I would prefer to just reinstall (especially since I keep all of my data on a network disk called a Snap! Server - this makes it much less painful to reinstall). Alternately, of course, you could keep this service turned off under normal conditions, then turn it on just before you make changes, then after the changes are "proved", turn it off again.
How do you turn it all off? Click "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel" then "System". Click the "System Restore" tab, then check the "Turn off system restore" box. You will be asked if you really want to do it - say YES if you really do.
I also like to turn off the service, since that just takes extra memory and processing power.
How
do you turn off the service? Select "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel",
"Administrative Tools" and "Services" to start the "Services" applet.
Scroll down to the "System Restore Service" service, select the line and
right click. Select "Stop" from the menu to stop the service immediately.
Once it stops, right-click again and select "Properties". Click on
"Startup type" and change it to "Manual".
Click OK to save your changes.
System restore will now be turned off.
Remote
Assistance is supposed to allow other people in a corporation to "assist
you" by connecting to your desktop (it's not available in Windows XP Home
so skip this section unless you have the professional version).
If you have Windows XP Professional installed at home (as I do), then this service is totally useless, not to mention a performance issue and, more importantly, a security issue (it's another thing that hackers can use to get into your system).
So by all means turn it off. Click "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel" then "System". Click the "Remote" tab, then uncheck the "Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer" box. Also clear the "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" box. Click OK to save your changes.
Contrary
to popular belief, MSN Messenger requires a huge amount of memory just to
sit there in the background. This is downright silly if you don't even use
the program or if you only use it infrequently. It's also a possible
security risk, since lord only knows what's it's doing while it's sitting
there, listening for someone to chat with.
To turn it off, simple double-click the icon in the system tray, select "Options" from the "Tools" menu, then clear "Run this program when Windows starts" and "Allow this program to run in the background". Click OK to save your changes.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.