2 Things I did that really improved my PC's performance

1.
Start
Control Panel
System
Advanced/Performance/Settings
Visual Effects/select Adjust for Best Performance

2.
Start
Control Panel
System
Advanced/Virtual Memory/select Change/On my main Hard Drive ("C:") I increased Initial Size from 750MB to 1000MB and also increased Maximum Size from 1500MB to 2000MB.

This turns off the video processing fancy bells and whistles that slow down processing and take up memory resources and increases the amount of processing power and memory available for the system to use.

By my own personal estimate doing the above seems to have increased overall speed and stability by around 20-25%.

Programs launch faster and web pages load quicker.

Running a 5 year old Dell Dimension 5100 on a P4 processor with Windows XP Home with 500MB of memory.

Browser is either Google Chrome or Firefox, sometimes Internet Explorer.

I thought it was gonna be something like this:

1. Threw out my PC
2. Bought a MAC

Firefox is the heaviest of the three. I suggest sticking with Chrome for the time being. I would stay away from IE.

I would suggest going to Start, then Run, and type msconfig. Check out what's in Startup. Remove anything that doesn't need to be there. That'll save you a few megs of memory as well and keep them from running in the background taking up cpu resource.

Another way is to drop those annoying internet security applications and just keep a virus/malware protection app (avast or avgfree are good ones). Browse the web safely without clicking on penis enlargement and free iPod links and you'll be fine.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by quix

I thought it was gonna be something like this:

1. Threw out my PC
2. Bought a MAC

Firefox is the heaviest of the three. I suggest sticking with Chrome for the time being. I would stay away from IE.

I would suggest going to Start, then Run, and type msconfig. Check out what's in Startup. Remove anything that doesn't need to be there. That'll save you a few megs of memory as well and keep them from running in the background taking up cpu resource.

Another way is to drop those annoying internet security applications and just keep a virus/malware protection app (avast or avgfree are good ones). Browse the web safely without clicking on penis enlargement and free iPod links and you'll be fine.

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All good stuff that I've done as well with the exception of tweaking the security applications and, of course, running a Mac.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Winsomemore

1.
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Advanced/Virtual Memory/select Change/On my main Hard Drive ("C:") I increased Initial Size from 750MB to 1000MB and also increased Maximum Size from 1500MB to 2000MB...

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I would suggest setting it to a static size (~2048 meg) instead of allowing it to be variable. That'll eliminate disk thrashing when it tries to resize the page file. If you need more than a 2G page file, get more ram.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rbochan

I would suggest setting it to a static size (~2048 meg) instead of allowing it to be variable. That'll eliminate disk thrashing when it tries to resize the page file. If you need more than a 2G page file, get more ram.

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Hadn't looked at it that way. Thanks.