Top 20 Tips
Sriraj Thankaraja
Follow these tips and you will definitely have a much faster and more reliable PC! Most of the below tips works for windows 98
1. Wallpapers: They slow your whole system down, so if you're willing to compromise, have a basic plain one instead!
2.
Drivers: Update your hardware drivers as frequently as possible. New
drivers tend to increase system speed especially in the case of
graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very
frequently!
3. Minimizing: If you want to use several programs
at the same time then minimize those you are not using. This helps
reduce the overload on RAM.
4. Boot Faster: The 'starting
Windows 95/98' message on startup can delay your booting for a couple
of seconds. To get rid of this message go to c:\ and find the file
Msdos.sys. Remove the Read-Only option. Next, open it in Notepad or any
other text editor. Finally, go to the text 'Options' within the file
and make the following changes: Add BootDelay=0. To make your booting
even faster, set add Logo=0 to remove the Windows logo at startup.
5.
Restart only Windows: When restarting your PC, hold down Shift to only
restart Windows rather than the whole system which will only take a
fraction of the time.
6. Turn Off Animations: Go to Display
Settings from the Control Panel and switch to the Effects Tab. Now turn
off Show Windows Content While Dragging and Smooth Edges on Screen
Fonts. This tip is also helpful with Windows XP because of the various
fade/scroll effects.
7. Faster Start-Menu Access: Go to the
Start menu and select Run. Now type Regedit and hit Enter. The Registry
Editor will appear on the screen. Now, open the folder
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. You should see a MenuShowDelay
value. If you don't then do the following: right click on a blank space
in the right pane and select New\String. Change the name in the new
value to MenuShowDelay. Now that we have the MenuShowDelay value,
double click on it and enter 0 in the value data field. This sets the
start menu delay to 0 milliseconds.
8. Resolutions: If you are
willing to do anything for faster performance from your PC, then try
lowering your display resolution. The lower it is, the faster your PC.
9.
Turn off Active Desktop: Go to your Display Properties and switch to
the Web tab. Uncheck View My Active Desktop As a Web Page. Since the
Active Desktop option under Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources,
this option can have a dramatic effect on the speed of the whole system.
10.
Defragment Often: Windows 98's Defrag tool uses Application
Acceleration from Intel which means that when you defragment your
drive, data is physically arranged on the drive so that applications
will load faster.
11. Take your PC to Bed: Using the Advanced
Power Management feature under Windows 98 gives you the option to use
the sleep command. That way, you can send your PC to sleep instead of
shutting it down and then restarting it. It's as simple as pressing a
button and then pressing the same button to wake it up. You can tell
Windows after how many minutes/hours of inactivity to automatically
sleep the machine in the Advanced Power Management section of the
Control Panel.
12. Faster Internet Access: If you use the
internet for reference and the sites you visit are rarely updated then
try the following. In IE (the same can be done in Netscape) go to
Tools, Internet Options. Next, click on Settings... in the Temporary
Internet Files section. Finally, select Never for the first option and
double the amount of storage space to use, click OK!
13.
Benchmarking: Benchmarking can be very useful when run frequently. It
can tell you how your PC's components are performing and then compare
them to other machines like yours. For example, when you overclock your
PC, you want to know how much more speed you have and whether it is
stable. All this and more can be discovered using benchmarking. An
excellent piece of software for doing this job is SiSoft Sandra which
can be found in the Downloads File Archive!
14. Refresh the
Taskbar without restarting: If you in some way change the taskbar,
either in Regedit or elsewhere, you can refresh the task bar without
restarting. Hold down Ctrl Alt Del, and double click on Explorer. Say
Yes to close Explorer, but no to closing Windows. This will refresh the
Taskbar and system tray.
15. Quick CD Eject: Instead of pushing
the button on your drive, right-click your CD drive letter in My
Computer and click on Eject. This will also remove any icons that have
become associated with the CD drive.
16. Start Up Programs:
Windows can be slowed down when programs run on start up. To eliminate
this, check your Start up folder. You can access it from the start
menu: Start, Programs, Start Up. Another way to eliminate programs from
loading even before Windows actually starts is by doing the following:
Click on Start, then Run. Type msconfig. It will take quite a long time
for this program to load, but when you finally see it on your screen,
explore the different tabs. They all have to do with how quickly your
PC boots, so select what you want, and uncheck what you don't want!
17.
Fonts: When Windows starts, it loads every single font in the Fonts
folder. Therefore, the more fonts you have, the slower the booting
process. To get rid of unwanted fonts, simply go to the Fonts folder
under c:\windows and remove whatever you don't want. Fonts that have a
red letter 'A' as their icon are system fonts, so don't delete them.
18.
Stretching Wallpapers: Don't "stretch" your wallpaper in Windows 98
since it actually slows Windows down when you drag icons around on the
desktop.
19. RAM Matters: If you have less than 32MB then you
should seriously think of upgrading it to at least 64MB. Windows runs
much more smoothly with 64MB or higher and tends to use less hard disk
space for virtual memory.
20. Partitioning: A very nice little
thing you can do to boost system performance. By partitioning your hard
drive, splitting one physical drive into several logical ones, you can
gain several advantages. 1. If you get a virus or you accidentally
format a drive, not all will be lost. 2. By placing the swap file
(Win386.swp) on a separate drive, The swap file will be less fragmented
and thus, faster. 3. Place Windows on a separate drive and whenever you
need to reinstall it, you rest assured that your data is safe on a
separate drive. Partitioning can be done using a few programs such as
FDisk which comes with DOS. However, FDisk formats everything on the
hard disk before partitioning. Alternatively, you can use Partition
Magic from Power Quest to partition your hard disk without losing your
data.