Speed up your PC

Having cleaned up your drive or drives, you should defragment them.

Again this is available from the XP or Vista Start Menu, Accessories, System Tools, or from the Tools tab of any drive properties.

Both XP and Vista let you check the drive state before defragging, and Vista lets you schedule regular defrags.

Paging file
Volumes have been written on the Windows paging (or swap) file and how to optimise it, but we’re going to keep things brief.

In both Vista and XP you can find the settings in System Properties, Advanced. Click the Settings button in the performance section. Then go to the Advanced tab, then Virtual memory, Change.

By far the best strategy is to let Windows manage the swap file. Vista will do this for all drives. If you do want to make any changes, check first that the drive on which you want to create a paging file has plenty of room and is defragmented.

Startup tips
A lot of software creators think it necessary to add startup items and System tray icons. At worst they can slow down startup time, ‘phone home’ and generate unwelcome pop-up messages.

If you Start, Run, Msconfig.exe, you’ll find a Startup tab that lists all these items, the executables that are run, and the folder or Registry key that runs them. If you clear the checkbox beside an item it will no longer load, but it will stay in the list so you can re-enable it.

We don’t advise disabling your anti-virus software, but many other startups can be disabled without any ill effects. We found on a test PC with 26 startup items, that disabling 22 inessential items slashed the time it took to log on from 80 to 40 seconds.

We’ve compiled a list of commonly found startup items, together with their ‘owners’ and their usefulness in the PDF table attached to this article. Vista users can also manage startup programs from Control Panel, Performance Information and Tools. Advanced users can find a more comprehensive startup controller ­ Autoruns 9.11 for Windows by Sysinternals ­ at PCW downloads.

Sleep or hibernate
There are other ways of speeding up Windows Startup. If you put your XP PC into Standby, it will go into a low-power state, turning off hard disks and the monitor but retaining the current state of Windows and applications in memory.

When you press a key, Windows will resume in a fraction of the normal boot time. You can opt either to return to the Welcome screen or your desktop ­ in either case the latter will be as you left it. The disadvantages of this are that your are still consuming energy and, should the power fail, you may lose unsaved data.

XP’s Hibernate saves the current state of the PC to disk before shutting down the PC completely. It still has to reboot but it will save re-opening all the programs, files and folders you were using.

Vista does things slightly differently, with two standby or sleep modes. Normal sleep is primarily designed for laptops. It’s similar to XP sleep except that should the battery level fall below a safe level, the contents of the memory are saved to disk ­ just as with Hibernate.