To Speed Up Your Computer - Without Upgrading Part II

4. An even more thorough disk check (and tune-up), would be to use a 3rd party utility (a stand-alone program outside of Windows) to check everything for you, automatically. One of my favorites is TuneUp Utilities 2004. It costs $39.99, but they do offer a FREE download trial of 15 days, to check it out to see if it speeds up your computer and/or fixes any problems. This program does a really good job of not only checking your computer’s file structure, master boot record, file allocation table, and files, but also an extremely good job of detecting and fixing bad sectors of your physical disk drives. And not only that, it also tunes up your system for increased speed, checks and cleans your registry, adjusts memory for you, tweaks your Internet settings for faster downloads and browsing (whether you use a dial-up or broadband), and streamlines your operating system for peak performance. I highly recommend this program. If you don’t have it, you can download it HERE... http://www.lapeertechgroup.com/downloads.asp

5. If you don’t want to get the TuneUp Utilities 2004, you can do a few of the performance tweaks yourself, if you have Windows XP. By default, EVERYTHING is turned on in Windows XP. It isn’t very streamlined for performance, but rather for appearance. You can turn off a few of the unnecessary features, and Windows will still work just fine, and maybe a little faster.

To do this, right-click on My Computer and click on Properties. Click on the Advanced tab. Under the Performance section, click on the Settings button. On the Visual Effects tab, you will see a list of check boxes. By default, these are all on. You really don’t need any of them. If you choose one of the radio buttons at the top, say, Adjust for Best Performance, then all of the check boxes will turn off. This will noticeably speed up your computer. You can go through the check boxes one by one, and determine which ones you can and can’t live without. The one that will make the biggest effect is the very last one in the list. This is the Themes. If you turn it off, it will free up a lot of system resources and give you quite a bit more memory to work with, but Windows XP will look more like Windows 2000. For most people, this isn’t a problem. It is all eye-candy, anyway. Your pretty green pasture picture will disappear; your pretty green and blue buttons and task bar will go to a gray. If you can live with these things, then you will have much more performance. You will find that menus open up much more quickly and everything responds more immediately.

6. Turn off Active Desktop. Active Desktop turns your desktop into a web page, and allows you to have things like a real-time calendar, and up-to-the-minute weather or stocks. These things are really neat, but your system takes a performance hit when they are running in the background all the time. And even if you don’t use Active Desktop for anything, just having it active can cause a performance decrease. Turn it off. a. In Windows 95, 98 and Me, right-click on the desktop and in the pop-up menu, choose Active Desktop. Inside that option, uncheck Active Desktop. If there is no check next to it, then it isn’t on. Don’t choose it. Instead, just click the desktop again to get out of the menu.

b. In Windows 2000, right-click on the desktop and in the pop-up menu, choose Active Desktop. Inside that option, uncheck Show Web Content. Again, if there is no check next to it, then it is not on. Do not check it.

c. In Windows XP, right-click on the desktop and in the pop-up menu, choose Properties. On the Desktop tab, choose Customize Desktop. Now, on the Web tab, make sure that there are no websites chosen here. If there aren’t any, then Active Desktop is not on. Cancel and go back to the desktop.

7. Install and run a good AntiVirus program (regularly) to keep out viruses and Trojan horses that can take over your system. If you have a virus(s), your system performance can be dramatically decreased. Viruses can do all kinds of nasty things to your computer. They can take over your computer, erase your hard drive, use your computer as a server, give you a bunch of illegal music or programs and tell all of their friends to download it all from you – leaving you holding the bag and supplying the computer space and bandwidth for their hobby. So, protect yourself with a good AntiVirus program. One of my favorites is AVG. It is not only a really good AntiVirus program, but it is also FREE! If you don’t have any AntiVirus software on your computer, get AVG AntiVirus NOW by downloading HERE...

http://www.lapeertechgroup.com/downloads.asp. If you already have an AntiVirus program, and you want to use AVG instead, do NOT install AVG. First, uninstall your current AntiVirus program, reboot and install AVG. You do NOT want to have two AntiVirus programs installed at the same time. They will work against each other and can cause problems.