Adjust XP settings for faster performance Even with good reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista, faster is not one of the reasons. Vista has added several features to increase speed, but they are mainly designed to compensate for the performance depleted by increased resources. By making some simple adjustments to the existing xp settings, you can get a speed boost. Abandoning Fancy All the animations and visual effects used by XP affect speed, especially for low-end systems. Yes, we know that we are teaching you to add a lot of fancy things to XP, but the tastes of users are different. If you prefer speed compared to fancy, you can give up the fancy features of XP to speed up. Select the “Control Panel”“System” “Advanced” tab, in the "Performance" area, click the “Set" button. In the "Visual Effects" tab, select the “Customize” option and then minimize the checked option —— in the checkbox, the less the option, the faster the system will run. As long as the "smooth screen font edges" and <;use visual effects on windows and buttons> these two options are selected, most people will not notice how the screen appearance changes. Then click “OK” is complete. (Restrict XP's visual effects to increase speed.) Internet connection optimization Nowadays, computers without fast network connections can no longer be called computers. Vista automatically adjusts the network connection for the best performance, but we can get similar speeds on XP by using a connection adjustment tool. At the bottom of the main screen, select “Best Settings", use the cursor to select the speed of the internet connection, and then click “Apply” to restart the computer. If there are any problems during the adjustment process, you can revert to the previous settings, as you will make a backup every time you make changes to TCP Optimizer. (Adjust XP's network settings with TCP Optimizer.) Limiting Windows Junk File Cache Disk performance is a limiting factor affecting the performance of most systems. If the disk is full, it will slow down. Because accessing files that are spread over the disk requires disk heads for extra movement. A full disk is a slow disk, so the best way to improve performance is to uninstall unwanted programs and delete junk files. By default, XP's System Restore feature uses 12% of the total space on each partition to save restore point files and settings. For example, a 200GB hard drive is divided into two 100GB partitions, and each partition will use 12GB to retain system restore files. Under standard settings, XP generates restore points every day. The actual size of each restore point varies, but they are generally less than 50MB. This means that the default setting allows you to run a 200-day restore point, which is much more than anyone needs. You can do a lot of system restore settings through the registry, but a simple change in the user interface can solve the problem. Select the “Control Panel” “System” “System Restore” tab. Move the cursor until it shows about 1000MB of disk space for the restore point. It doesn't matter if the number is accurate, because it is expressed as a percentage of the total disk space, so getting an exact number is not easy. (Reducing the disk space used by System Restore.) Since today's hard drives are large, you need to move the cursor to 1% or 2%. As soon as you click the "OK" button, XP will delete the old restore point to achieve the disk space settings you requested. And because the new restore points continue to increase, the old restore points will continue to be deleted. The recycle bin will also take up space greedily. By default, it takes up 10% of the hard disk space, up to 4GB. It's convenient for the recycle bin to restore accidentally deleted files, but 4GB is extremely lethal for most systems. If you clean the desktop frequently and empty the recycle bin regularly, you can ignore the settings of the recycle bin. Otherwise, it is best to reduce the size of the recycle bin. Right-click on "Recycle Bin" and select “Options and then reduce the Recycle Bin to the size you think is appropriate, such as 1GB. (Controls the size of the Recycle Bin.) Unlike System Restore, the Recycle Bin Options dialog box is quite cumbersome to calculate. The cursor only shows the percentage of the disk size, not the actual size. Once you have selected the size with the cursor, you can click on the “Personal Disk” tab to see the amount of disk space. But don't be too aggressive. If you delete files in the future that are larger than the recycle bin, this file will be deleted forever and cannot be restored.