Speed Up Windows Guide

If you missed Part I of Speed Up Windows Guide Here It Is

http://speed-up-windows-guide.blogspot.com/2008/06/speed-up-windows-guide-part-i.html

But Now For Part II

This part will cover more advanced ways you can speed up windows and find what may be causing your windows machine to be running slower than normal and also a few changes you can make that may help but can be easily reveres if no performance increase is gained.

Hard Disk Drive Being Paged Constantly

I will start with a common problem I come across many times and that the Default Windows XP Task Manager does not help you with, and that is what to do when the CPU usage is not high but the Hard Drive is constantly being paged.
The first thing to try and resolve this behaviour is a util from Microsoft's Web Site called Process Explorer for Windows link is below.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Download, Unzip, and Run, then minimize to task bar ready to go.

Then use your normal programs, when the hard drive starts being aggressively being constantly paged then pull up the minimized Process Explorer (see pic below)

And then press Ctrl-I up will come the following screen.

On the I/O Bytes line of the graph hopefully you will see a peak of activity, if you hover over the peak it should show you the culprit, you will then t least have a clue as to what is causing the activity you can then Google the process if you are not sure what it is.

Click on the Advanced Tab and click the settings button in the performance section, when the performance option page is displayed click the advanced tab on this page the following page will be displayed.

Now click the change button under the virtual memory section to which the following screen will be displayed.

As you can see in the above picture the paging file is set to "System managed size" what we are going to do is set the initial size and the maximum size to the same number and the number we will use is going to be double the size that Windows is recommending.

There is a lot of talk between it professionals as to what this should be set to but I always play safe by doubling the recommended size, hard drive space permitting

Obviously your PC may show a different Recommended size so you should use this for you calculation.

But in this instance Windows Recommended size is 573 MB so doubling this gives us 1146 MB so we put 1146 in the Initial Size and The Maximum Size boxes like below.

We then click the Set button and then OK and select OK to the screens behind until back at the desktop.

I would then recommend rebooting your PC.

If this makes no difference to the problem of the Hard Drive being constantly used then it can be reverted back to use the System Managed Size by reversing the instructions above.

Stop Any Unnecessary Background Scheduled Tasks

Click Start button, select run and type tasks in the run box and click OK, up will come the following screen.

Click on the Advanced Tab and click the settings button in the performance section, the performance option page is displayed see below.

Play around with the settings on the visual effects page as above. you can dive straight in and select adjust for best performance and if this makes a big difference go back in and fine tune with the custom option.

Disable Indexing Service

If you do not do a lot of file searches on your machine and generally know where all you files are then this can be an unnecessary memory hungry application, to temporarily remove it do the following.

Go to the Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs. Click the Add/Remove Window Components. Simply unclick the Indexing services and click next! if you need it back on again simply tick the box again.

I do hope these 2 posts help in resolving and also maybe boosting your performance issues, again it is allways advantageious to run spyware scans, Defrags, temporary file removals and checks to make sure you have plenty of hard drive space available as often as possible to keep your machine in top condition

The information given above is as guidance only and the author cannot be responsible for any problems or data loss this guidance may cause.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Had a client phone today saying his XP Pro machines seemed to be running slower than when they purchased them, This is a problem I hear all the time and sent him the following. After doing so I thought it may also be of help to other people with this issue.

I will follow it up next week with more advanced tips

Please leave comments as you wish and if this document helps in anyway please feel free to visit My Sponsors. :-)

1. Check that you are not running out of disk space, I always make sure I have ¼ of my Hard Disk Drives Total Capacity free. To check the disk space Double Click “My Computer” on the desktop the right click the Local Disk (C:) and select properties, a pie chart should be show as below.



The information on this chart speaks for its self.

If you are running low on disk space then maybe archiving some data (i.e. MP3, Pics, Films, etc) to CD if you have a burner may be in order.

At this stage you should also try to clear out your temp files for this I use CCleaner you can get this for FREE here http://www.ccleaner.com



2. Make sure your PC is Virus and Spyware free. If you do not have a scanner for each of these you could download one of each using the links below or find one for yourself.

Free Virus Protection:

http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav/index.adp

Free Spyware Removal:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=435bfce7-da2b-4a6a-afa4-f7f14e605a0d&displaylang=en

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

http://www.ewido.net/en/download/






3. Check if any processes are running typically high on CPU usage. To do this first close all open programs and then press Ctrl-Alt-Del together and select Taskmanager Button the select the processes tab, If you then click the CPU header so that it sorts in Descending order and look for any items than are still using the CPU (ignore the one called system idle process, they higher this is the better) see below

If you click the startup tab you will see a similar screen as above. You can then try unticking various items and restarting to see if it is one item in particular that is causing your issues. (Be careful if you disable your Anti Virus software do not open any files or download/open any emails, also if you disable your Firewall do not connect to the internet during this testing phase) if you have unchecked all these and machine is still running slow you can put the ticks back in.

You can also stop services from starting using this tool to further help in diagnosing your speed issues.

By clicking the services tab (See pic above) and checking the box “Hide all Microsoft Services” (this is so you don’t stop a critical MS service) you can uncheck a service one by one and restart your machine (Be careful if you disable your Anti Virus software do not open any files or download/open any emails, also if you disable your Firewall do not connect to the internet during this testing phase)

Although this process can be time consuming it can be very helpful in sorting your speed problem.

Although I would not recommend you play around with the Microsoft services I have known a few services to slow machines down in the past which you could try stopping temporally these are as follows.

Background Intelligent Transfer Service
SSDP Discovery Service
Universal Plug And Play Device Host

To stop/start services in Windows click start, RUN and type services.msc then click OK you can then right click the service you would like to stop and select stop service

If this makes no difference in speed then right click and start it up again.

The above information may fix your problem or at least give you a clue as to what is causing the issue.

I

Part II of this post is now online to view it click here.

http://speed-up-windows-guide.blogspot.com/2008/06/speed-up-windows-guide-part-ii.html

The information given above is as guidance only and the author cannot be responsible for any problems or data loss this guidance may cause