During the past 7 months, I have been volunteering to tutor people in a Library Geek program at the Westhampton Free Library. Many of my appointments have dealt with laptops and trying to cleanup the computer and improve its overall performance. For this article’s purposes, I am going to make the assumption that the computer is running Windows XP or Windows Vista Operating System.

The first thing I check out is the system properties. Right click on My Computer or Computer, and choose “Properties”. On Windows Vista, one will also need to click on Advanced system settings located in the left section of the window under Tasks. On the Advanced tab, click on Performance Options. Choose custom under Visual Effects, then proceed to uncheck the options that start with Animate, Fade, or Slide. These are unnecessary bells and whistles that don’t give much benefit but eat up computer resources.  As you flip through the many tabs in the System Properties, there are additional features one can safely turn off.  On Windows XP, one can turn off error reporting but get notified of critical errors. Turn off Remote Assistance or Remote Desktop. The other important thing to look for in this section is System Restore, check the option to configure drives independently here.  Navigate to the C Drive, move the slider down towards 1 percent. I usually like to keep a reserved space of 700-800MB for System Restore but if 1 percent is greater than that, so be it. Once completed making these changes, be sure to choose apply and then ok.

The next thing I do is right click on Recycle Bin and choose properties. Once again, I like to reserve 700-800MB for the Recycle Bin but if 1 percent is greater than that, so be it. Between the System Restore and Recycle Bin modifications, one will gain valuable hard drive space back and reduce the reserved space the operating system utilizes, which ultimately reduces unnecessary bloat.

Along the same lines, I next head towards the Control Panel and choose Internet Options. On the General tab, I click on settings under Browsing History. Here I like to reserve 250MB for Temporary Internet Files and choose zero for days to keep pages in history.

In the Control Panel, I usually will customize the mouse and keyboard properties to the person’s preferences as well.

Next, I right click on the taskbar and choose properties.  On the various tabs for Taskbar and Start Menu Properties, I usually choose to uncheck the hide inactive icons setting, group similar taskbar buttons, and the history of recently opened files and programs.

I also right click on the desktop and choose properties or personalize. On the various tabs, I look for the drop-down to utilize Cleartype to smooth edges of screen fonts. In this same section on Windows XP, there is another drop-down menu where I choose Scroll instead of Fade.  One should be able to find these settings under Appearance, and then effects. On Windows XP, I also look on the Desktop tab and customize desktop and uncheck the desktop cleanup wizard. One should also add the Computer and Documents icons to the desktop if they are not already there.

After tweaking the above settings, I will next proceed to the Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features in the Control Panel. Remove unnecessary programs or outdated ones as well. On the left side of this window, one will see Add/Eemove windows components or Turn Windows features on or off. Here one can turn off the Indexing Service, Games, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, and Windows Messenger if you do not utilize them.

To get more advanced at this point, click Start, Run, and type in regedit. Go to edit menu, then find, type in MenuShowDelay. Right click on the MenuShowDelay, choose Modify, and enter 0 and choose ok. One can also modify the registry keys for WaitToKillAppTimeout, HungAppTimeout, and WaitToKillServiceTimeout to values of 1000.

After all the above tweaks are completed, I will next run Microsoft Update and update everything available. Be sure to update your programs such as Adobe Reader, Flash Player, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Itunes, Divx Player, and Java. Be sure to have an Antivirus program, I prefer AVG Free. On Windows XP, one can download and install the Startup Control Panel. In Windows Vista, one can choose Windows Defender from the Control Panel, and choose Manage Startup Programs on the left-hand side.

The final part of the process is to focus on the System Tray. All icons in the system tray are currently running processes on one’s computer. Right click on these system tray icons and look for settings, preferences, or options and look for opportunities to prevent some of these programs from running on startup. Hope this helps some of you to speed up your computers.