There are about a million of these “go faster” things on the net, dont believe me? Type windows xp tuneup into Google and it will find over 2 million pages.
So how do you find a good one? Tricky.
First get your expectations in order.
If you have an old “4 cylinder 2 door with a lift up back” PC no amount of tweaking and clean-up is going to get it to perform like one of those fancy “briight red V12 Ferrari” PCs. In all honesty it isn’t going to run as well as it did when you first got it.
Why? Well the never-ending flood of Microsoft patches , virus checking updates, firewalls, antispyware updates, and a system tray that takes up half the bottom of your screen would be good culprits. All these things add up over time. And NO you cant just delete them all. Your PC would have a life expectancy measured in milliseconds once you connected it to the net.
But all that being said. It is still worth doing.
Here is the blurb from a post at Tweak3D…
A fine-tuned Windows XP PC can run quite fast even it’s seriously lacking in the memory and CPU department. Before you chuck out your PC to buy a new one, try stripping some of the rust that’s built-up over the years; the results may surprise you.
It’s probably your operating system that’s slow, not the PC. It’s software, not hardware – you know, invisible 1s and 0s held in an electric field representing your data. Your computer is still fast, but there’s a ton of stuff slowing it down. There’s more 1s where there should be 0s and your PC is killing itself fighting an impossible battle to burn off this fat.
We’ve seen Pentium II machines with 128 MB RAM run XP faster than Pentium IVs with 4x the clock speed and 4x the RAM – so what gives? This article will help you figure out why your PC is running slow and outline exact steps to fix it quickly, before throwing in the towel with a format, restore, or new PC purchase.
Tweak3D.net – Windows XP 15 Minute Tune-Up
I remember reading an article that said most people would rather buy a new PC and start again from scratch than do all this stuff. Some people dont have that option.