There are many small things that makes big differences in the performance of
a Windows PC. Many of us knows some of them, but most of us dont know all
of it. This thread is meant to share those performance tips for Windows operating systems.

How large should be the OS partition ?

This is a question that is being asked ever since the existance of user partitionable drives on computers. There are many theories... Let me
explain one of them.

Usually, the user tends to click "I agree > next > next > next > Finish"
for any software installation and that makes the difficulty.
This means all programs will be installed to the default OS drive.
So the OS partition should be large...

But, the problem is, if OS partition is large, the OS files will start scattering here and there in the partition (fragmentation) and that will make ur system slow.

Whenever a bad shutdown occurs, the disk check/repair utilities will take a long time to complete if the OS drive is large.
Overall response time of the system will be slow.

So I would suggest partitioning the OS drive with minimum space that would be needed by the OS (like 4GB).

You need to do some other configuration to make the system reliable. I will try to post all of them in the following posts.

On a 4GB partition, installing and maintaining the OS will be a tough job for you if you are used to that 40 GB partitions...

But believe me, it's worth the trouble.

To save space, you can change the location of the PageFile.SYS
virtual memory file and hiberfil.sys hybernation file to another drive.
This will also make your OS partition less chance of getting currupted.

And whenever you install applications, make it to install to another drives program files folder.

If you get use to this method, you can see that your system's performance
does not degrade with time. It will perform as fast as a fresh installation of
the OS.

Avoiding creation of stupid THUMBS.DB

Although it is not a performance issue, I hate the OS dropping a file in each folder with out my concern. That too sometimes it grows to 512 KB or even more.

To turn off the creation of thumbs.db,

open my computer,
select folder options from tools menu,
in View Tab, choose DONOT CACHE THUMBNAILS.

Now you can search all drives for THUMBS.dB and delete it.

Making File Search Much Faster


In Windows XP, file search is very slow when compared to Windows 98.

This is due to some advanced search facilities included into the Windows XP for making it capable of search inside Compressed files.

Most of the time we dont require to search inside compressed folders.
But unfortunately, we dont have an option to disable it.

Here is a work around

Execute this command in the Run Window

%windir%\system32\regsvr32.exe /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll

And Windows will not search in compressed files.

This works by disabling the built in ZIP support of Windows. Believe me, WinRAR is much useful than the integrated zip support. If you want to
re enable the zip support, you can run the same command without the /u
parameter.

You will have to run the command just before you want to do a search.
This is because windows automatically re-registers the DLL when
we click onm any zip file.

But better you can create a short cut on the desktop and click it before doing a search.

For the best performance PC, you will have to compromise on looks.
XP's default interface together with some additional style enhancement packages may make ur PC look like an alien ship controller, but it wont help
with the performance. For best performance, donot use wallpaper, and select the adjust for best performance in the performance settings dialog available in
the "advanced" tab of system properties dialog.

For the best performance PC, you will have to compromise on looks.

XP's default interface together with some additional style enhancement
packages may make ur PC look like an alien ship controller, but it wont help
with the performance. For best performance, donot use wallpaper, and select the adjust for best performance in the performance settings dialog available in
the "advanced" tab of system properties dialog.

Some little things that I've found that help as well are:

- Keeping drivers up to date

- Making sure to use antimalware/firewall software, particularly avoiding bloated software packages like Norton

Ya that right... Choosing the right antivirus/spyware/firewall package and configuring it properly is very important for best performance.

Every antivirus checks all types of files by deafult, but there will be an option to set only a specific type of files to be scanned. Using this option properly cam make your pc respond much faster.

And again, Install less number of fonts. This will make your PC boot faster. It will also help you while working with document editing packages like MS wrod.