There are always people out there who are longing to upgrade their computers to the latest operating systems with the dreamful hope that the computer will magically speed up. Others tend to look to upgrading their RAM for that added speed. Some would even look to a registry cleaner for the help. Sadly, what many people do not realize is that this is the expensive way of obtaining the speed that they want. Please, allow me to give you a couple of other ways you can speed up WinXP:

Many people do not realize that by customizing the operating system, the speed of your computer can be improved! Here’s how you can go about doing it.

#1 Switch off Windows Index Service

If you find that your hard drive is making a lot of noise, even when you computer is not in use, this is because the internal parts of your computer are still working. What they are doing is indexing your files so that the CPU can find then easier. This may sound like a good thing, but the problem is that sometimes your system doesn’t filter through the files and programs that it indexes, therefore everything is indexed, including unimportant, unneeded files. This will strain your computer and slow down it’s performance. Do yourself and you computer a favor to fix this problem:

1. Go to My Computer, select View menu and go to Explorer Bar and select Search

2. Select Change Preferences before clicking on Without Indexing Service

3. Click No to not enable Indexing Service and finally click OK.

#2 Using NTFS to hasten your hard drive

If you were to configure your NTFS hard drive it would give you better security, higher-grade encryption and better compression. Windows XP allows you to do this configuring to the NTFS hard drive so that your computer can be given a speed boost, so make sure that you make full use of this opportunity! A faster hard drive would also mean that you would need to make sure that your computer had enough space for the conversion of FAT to NTFS because they take up a lot of space. Follow these steps to switch the NTFS system:

1. Click on Start

2. Click on Run

3. Type in ‘cmd’ and hit Enter

4. At the command prompt, type, “convert Z:/FS:NTFS” where Z is the letter of your hard drive

5. Press ‘Enter’

#3 Disabling all unnecessary startups

The performance of your computer depends greatly on how well you are able to manage your processes and programs. Windows XP gives users the option of that programs that they want to load into the configuration. All that is really needed is 6 programs for a computer to be able to function most of the time. No wonder our computer lag so much! You have to get your computer to make sure that upon startup it is able to perform at its tiptop speed. Follow these steps:

1. Click Start

2. Select Run

3. Type in “msconfig.exe”

4. Under "system configuration utility", select the "startup" tab 5. Uncheck the boxes of the programs you do not wish to use 6. Hit the OK button

If you follow these three steps your computer will be assisted in receiving a boost in speed. There are several other methods in which you can go about doing this, but trust me, these three are more than sufficient to give you your computer speed that extra boost that you wanted.