Speed up Windows without Registry hacks

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, How-Tos

Speed up Windows without Registry hacks

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Feb 20th 2006

Keshav sent us a nice list of things you can do to your machine to speed up Windows. Some are easy, some are obvious— some are not. Most importantly, most are quite safe. Disabling services can sometimes be wonky, but that's about as extreme as this one gets (OK, the prefetch thing makes me a little nervous and it's debateable whether or not it really speeds anything up). One nice tip out of the bunch: getting rid of those delete confirmation messages. Just nice to get that one turned off finally. Once you're ready, check out the legendary Black Viper Services Configuration page.

Tags: registry, speed, tweak

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

larryni said 7:04PM on 2-20-2006

The prefetch thing doesn't work for anything but WMP. I saw it recommended in many places on the net, but never saw any performance increases. I asked Ed Bott (Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out) about it. You can find his post about it here- http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=621

Nicholas said 1:50AM on 3-08-2006

Seconded on the prefetch thing-- people don't know what the crap they're talking about when they write "speed up" guides. Most are balonely.

Another thing guides get wrong is the "turn off last access date".. really, go do some tests with that on and then off, and let me know how much faster your system is. Oh wait, it isn't. And you've now lost the ability to see when files are added/removed from a windows share. Congrats!

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