Norton Utilities in Windows XP

Norton Utilities is a program developed by the computer anti virus manufacturer Norton.

You can use Norton Utilities to do a number of computer maintenance tasks such as cleaning the registry, defragmenting drives, cleaning the hard disk of unwanted files and managing Windows services.

If you have Norton Utilities installed on your Windows XP computer, you can run it via "All Programs" from start menu.

Instructions

1. Click on the button labeled "Start" on the Windows XP taskbar.
2. Drag the mouse pointer to the option labeled "All Programs" to bring up a drop down menu containing all of the programs installed on your computer.
3. Run Norton Utilities by clicking the program labeled "Norton Utilities."

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Background Intelligent Transfer Service

What is Background Intelligent Transfer Service?

 

 

Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is a component of modern Microsoft Windows operating systems that facilitates prioritized, throttled, and asynchronous transfer of files between machines using idle network bandwidth. It is most commonly used by recent versions of Windows Update, Microsoft Update, Windows Server Update Services, and Systems Management Server to deliver software updates to clients.

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Tips to Increase Games Performance in Windows XP

How does Windows affect my gaming performance?

The Windows operating system is not meant for one single purpose, compared to a gaming console. It is built to deal with all kinds of tasks, such as surfing the Web, editing photos, running office applications, connecting to social networks, and much, much more. All of these tasks need dozens of background processes and services running at the same time which take up processor and memory resources. So, unlike a console, your hardware is not able to solely focus on gaming. To increase speed for gaming purposes, it is vital that you reduce all of the unnecessary background activity on your system.

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Speed Up Windows 7 - Adjust the number of Cores

Windows 7 uses only one type of Core for the booting process. By changing the number of Core used, you can reduce the booting time and can Speed Up Windows 7 Performance.

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Speed Up Your PC By Disabling XP Splash Screen

Speed Up Windows XP

Disable XP Splash Screen:

Here’s a method that will speed up the overall boot process of your PC by disabling the XP splash screen. Doing this will hide away any boot-up messages and shows the list of drivers loading at startup.

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Speed Up PC Performance - BIOS Optimization

What is the BIOS?

The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is a small memory chip located on the motherboard containing data that define the system parameters. As some BIOS data are written in a ROM, it is not possible to change them, however, certain parameters are accessible from the BIOS setup, which can be enabled right after start-up, usually by pressing the <F1> or <DEL> key (it may be another key, in which case at start-up you will see a message like "HIT 'DEL' TO ENTER SETUP"). BIOS setup is a sort of "BIOS configuration panel".

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Speed Up Windows XP

Speed Up Menu Display

Microsoft Windows XP uses many visual effects to provide a rich, friendly interface. One of these settings allows menus to fade into view when you open them. This visual effect is so smooth that you may never have noticed it; however, the effect does cause menus to take a little longer to appear.

On a fast computer, this shouldn't be an issue. But on a computer that isn’t responding as quickly as you'd like, you can make menus display faster.

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How to Add Safe Mode to Boot Menu

Add Safe Mode to Windows Boot Menu/Show Safe Mode without pressing F8 or F5 :

                                  Usually we get the option to boot into safe mode by pressing F5 or F8. But this option can be shown in Windows Boot menu so you don’t have to press those buttons again.

1. Select Run command from the start menu.

2. Type in Control Panel and press enter.

3. Open the "System" icon from there and go to the Advanced Tab.

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Speed Up Windows XP - Increasing Virtual Memory

                   Virtual memory, also known as a page file or swap file, is a file on your hard drive (C:\pagefile.sys by default) that Windows and applications use in addition to physical memory (RAM) as needed.

                   Optimizing your page file when you're running low on RAM is always a good idea. When all physical RAM in a computer is in use, Windows starts using the hard disk as if it were additional RAM. This is why we have a Pagefile (also called the swap file). Because RAM memory is a lot more faster than the hard disk, whenever the computer begins to use the Pagefile to relieve memory pressure, we begin to experience a drastic performance degradation.
One of the most effective things you can do to improve performance is ensure that there is enough RAM available to avoid frequent paging (swapping) of memory contents between disk and RAM.

This means that the actual limit on the memory used by all applications is the amount of RAM installed plus the maximum size of the Pagefile.


How much swap space do you need?

That depends the amount of RAM you have and the programs you use. The rule of the thumb is 1.5 times the amount of system memory(RAM).

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Disable Hibernation to Save Hard Drive Space

                When a computer is put on the hibernation mode, the computer takes a snapshot of all the memory contents and the computer settings and saves all this information on the hard disk of the computer. After the information is saved, the computer turns off. The advantage of putting the computer on the hibernation mode is that when the computer is restarted all the memory contents and the settings are restored to the time when the computer was turned off. A great benefit of this is that there is no need for power by the computer to maintain itself in the hibernation state unlike the standby mode.

Sleep mode typically will store activity in RAM and then turn off the monitor or hard drive, but not the power to the computer. When the computer comes out of the hibernation mode all the programs and documents are restored. However, turning off hibernation mode can save a lot of disk space. The amount of space it will save depends on your pc, but it could save gigabytes worth of space.

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How to Automatically Clear Temp Files At StartUp

                                      Everybody don’t like junk. There are a lot of junk files created in Windows by default. The Disk Clean up Utility in Windows help us to remove the system Clutter upto certain extend. Disk Cleanup can also remove the outdated or older restore points being created by System Restore which we do not need any more. But there are many temporary files the Disk Clean up utility of Windows wont clean by default. We can configure it to clean up those unnecessary junk there by making more space available.

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Startup Optimization

Removing startup programs from Windows XP - the manual method

Manually removing Windows startup programs is relatively easy and straight-forward. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial showing you how to do it.

1. Once your computer’s desktop has loaded, click on the start button and then the “Run” button on the right side of the menu.

2. After you have clicked on “Run”, a new window should popup - type in “msconfig” without the quotes and hit the “Ok” button.

3. Yet another window will pop up - this is the System Configuration Utility. You’re going to want to click on the “Startup” tab on the far right side.

At this point, you’ll see the location where you can add or remove startup programs from your PC.You can see the Startup program name in the left column, the physical path to the file that is being executed when your computer boots up in the middle and the location within the registry where this command is stored in the right column.

4. When you have completed your removal of unnecessary startup entries, click on the “Apply” button and then “OK” at the bottom of the System Configuration Utility. You’ll have to reboot your PC for the changes to take effect.

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