PC Doctor+ Guide 18 Housekeeping

Speeding Up Windows XP and 2000

I like Windows XP. That said, in their efforts to bring you an all singing all dancing piece of software Microsoft have delivered us an enormous - some would say bloated operating system.

People use Windows for all sorts of purposes and in all sorts of situations: home, office, networking etc. Windows tries to cater for all possibilities by loading up lots of background programs or services to deal with whatever the user may throw at it. The thing is not many of us need all of it.

Every background program Windows loads takes up its own piece of memory and processor time. It follows therefore that if we could off-load some of the stuff we don't need then our PC would be slimmer, fitter and faster.

Before we get going we need to make a restore point so that if anything goes wrong we can return the machine back to the point when we started. This is a good idea whenever you change anything or add hardware to your machine.

To create a RESTORE point follow the path PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/SYSTEM TOOLS/ SYSTEM RESTORE

then click the second radio button to create a restore point and follow the instructions.

Once you've done this we can get to work.

Many of the services that you don't need are set to load automatically on start-up. We are going to change the setting for these services from automatic to manual. This means that they will no longer load each time we start windows (thereby using up precious resources) but they are still there if we need them - we can just start them manually instead.

Just follow the instructions below regarding how to go about it and you will be more happy with the result.

To begin:

• Open the Control Panel
• Look for and Open the Administrative Tools folder
• Double Click on the Services tool.
• When the Services Window opens set the View to Detail if it isn‘t already.
• Click the Start-up Type column header. This will sort the services alphabetically by Start-up Type. When you do so, all the Services that currently start automatically will appear at the top of the list.
• Look down the list of services on your system whose Start-up Type setting is set to Automatic. Look for the services listed in the Table below and check the conditions.

   

  These services are good candidates to be changed to a Manual Start-up Type.
  
  Services That Can Be Changed to Manual Start-up
  Note: If you are using your computer as a stand alone personal computer then in all probability most of the conditions below will be fulfilled and you can go ahead and change the settings to MANUAL

   

  If you find a match and think that your system doesn‘t need a particular service, right-click on the service and choose the Properties command from the shortcut menu.

   

  When the Properties box dialog box for that service appears, click the Start-up Type drop down list and select Manual. Then click OK. As you change the Start-up Type for any service, take note of the service‘s name. That way you‘ll have a record of which services you changed and can always change it back if you need to without doing a full system restore.
   

Once you've completed the task you will need to re-boot. The first effect you will likely notice is the reduced time it takes Windows to start.