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Give Windows room to breathe.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
3 easy pieces: No-cost ways to speed up your Windows PC
Jan. 25, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
You don't have to spend money to speed up your personal computer. This week I'm offering three easy ways to speed up your Windows PC at no cost. I'll have a similar article about speeding up Macintosh computers in a coming Road Less Traveled column, which appears in Wednesday's newspaper.
1. Put your PC on a software diet. Cut out all the junk programs that start up (usually without your knowledge) when you turn on your computer. A typical Windows PC might have a dozen or more programs that do this. They sometimes show their icons in the "tray" area near the clock, but many of them hide so thoroughly you'd never know they are lurking in the background, slowing your computer and eating up memory.
I recommend the free startup enforcer from Mike Lin called Startup Control panel. It shows you all the programs that sneak into the startup sequence and lets you disable the ones that don't belong. (They're never deleted, so you can't do much harm by disabling them. If you find you need any of them, just open Startup Control Panel and re-enable them.) Get the software from http://www.mlin.net.
2. Give Windows room to breathe. The operating system needs a lot of extra disk space for those "One-Time Charley" files it creates on the fly for temporary use. It needs extra space for other reasons, too. When the disk runs short of room, Windows runs out of steam.
To free up disk space, take these steps:
A. Uninstall programs you don't need using the Control Panel's "Add-Remove Programs" function.
B. Get rid of temporary files. They're usually in a folder named "Temp" in the Windows folder. (The Windows folder might be called "WINNT" on some computers.) Begin this part of your cleanup by rebooting. That frees up most temporary files so you can delete them. Find the Temp folder by using the "Find" or "Search" function in the Start Menu and typing TEMP as the search term. After you locate it, open the folder and try to delete everything you see there. If Windows tells you it won't let you get rid of some files or folders, leave them alone and delete everything else.
C. Stop hoarding old stuff. You probably have a lot of old files in My Documents you don't need any more. Drag them to the Recycle Bin and then empty the trash. (Right click on the Recycle Bin and you'll see the menu.) Do the same for old music files (MP3s you downloaded but didn't want to keep, for example) and old downloads.
D. Empty your Web browser cache. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu and choose Internet Options. Under "Temporary Internet Files," click the "Delete Files" button and then click "OK." Other browsers have a similar function, although the menu items might be named differently.
3. Launch your programs and open your documents using hotkeys instead of mouse clicks. Anything in Windows that can be represented by a shortcut can also be activated by a combination of keys. Right click on the shortcut and choose Properties, then click the Shortcut tab at the top of the window. Left click inside the "Shortcut key:" assignment form and press the key (or combination of keys) you'd like to use to run that shortcut. Click "OK."
To use a hotkey, press the key combination at any time. To remove a hotkey assignment, open the shortcut form and press Backspace as the assigned key. This tells Windows to remove the assignment.
(Note: Windows won't let you use a single keystroke, even if you press only one in the assignment form. Windows always adds two modifier keys unless you press two modifier keys shorself. Modifier keys are Shift, Alt and Ctrl.)
Tip: To add launch hotkeys to items in the Start Menu, open the Start Menu as a folder. Right click on the Start button and click "Open," then right click on any item and choose "Properties."
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