by Gecko » Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:38 am
There are a few things you can do to keep it running faster.
Startup programs:
This is probably the most important thing to look at.
As you add more programs to your system a lot of them will add things to windows startup.
This least amount of thing running at start means more system resources for other things like games.
Most software comes with the option to turn off the startup setting you just have to find it but not all do.
For those you can use msconfig, click Start > Run > type msconfig and press enter.
Go to the Startup tab and uncheck the items you do not want to start with windows.
Don’t get carried away though windows has to have certain things running to work.
Below is a list of what starts on my system use as a guide as to what to leave:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\smss.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\services.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsv.exe
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\ccEvtMgr.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\crypserv.exe
C:\Program Files\Norton AntiVirus\navapsvc.exe
C:\Program Files\Norton AntiVirus\AdvTools\NPROTECT.EXE
C:\WINDOWS\System32\nvsvc32.exe
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\ccApp.exe
C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
Defrag:
Run defrag on you hard drive about once a month, for NTFS drives.
Keeping your hard drive and the page file defraged will help the system to run faster.
Installing programs:
Keep it to a minimum, every time you add a new program to windows it creates more registry keys making the registry get larger and larger.
Thus taking longer and longer to load because of the shear size of the registry.
My current registry is just over 21mb, a little large I’m afraid but I have a lot installed that I use.
I’ve seen registries that were over 50mb that’s a lot data to read through.
Temporary File folders:
Keep them all cleaned out, there are three main temp folders you have to worry about, they are:
C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Temp
C:\WINDOWS\Temp
You won’t be able to delete everything in there like index.dat and a .tmp file or two.