8 ways to speed up Windows XP - Day 4

Day 4 – Reduce Windows Visual effects 

Windows XP has Visual effects activated by default to give it the appearance you are no doubt familiar with. These effects do have a performance overhead and may contribute to any slowness you are encountering.

The following steps will take you through how to optimise these settings to match your performance requirements.

Click on Control Panel in the Start menu (Ensure you are in Classic View)

Click the System icon

Click the Advanced tab and then click Settings under the performance option

The Visual Effects tab provides an easy way to set your preferences. You can select the 'Adjust for best peformance' or you can customise which features are applied.

Take some time to play around with these settings, you may like the results.

How to uninstall an application or program

To uninstall an application or program that is installed on Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server, complete the following steps :

1. Go to Start menu
2. Control panel
3. Select Add or Remove programs
4.You will be shown a list of the programs that are installed on your machine. Find the application/program you wish to uninstall and select it.
5. A button titled 'Change/Remove' now be displayed.
6. Click the button and follow the 'Uninstall wizard' which will guide you through the removal process.

What to do when a USB drive won't show up in My Computer

Sometimes when you plug a USB storage device such as a pen drive or hard disk into your PC you may notice that it doesn't show up in 'My Computer' as you would expect. This is normally caused by one of two things. The first is that the PC is trying to assign an existing drive letter to the new device and as a result the new drive cannot be displayed or there are no more available drive letters.

To check what the problem may be you will need to look at 'Disk Management' section of the 'Computer management' snap in. You can do this in the following way :

Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>highlight 'Disk Management'.

Your new device should show up here with a drive letter that is already in use. To resolve the issue

'Right click the device and select 'Change drive letter and paths' from the menu.
Select 'Change' and then choose a drive letter that is not currently in use.

Now when you go to 'My Computer' it will be there for you to access !.

If you have no available drive letters you will need to 'Right click' an existing drive in 'My Computer' and select 'Disconnect'. This will free up the drive letter.

Open control panel items from the 'Run' window

Below are useful shortcuts to items in control panel. Just press 'Winkey + r' to pop open the run dialogue.

Type the commands in bold and the items will open.

control - Control Panel
control folders - Folder Options
control userpasswords - User Accounts
control userpasswords2 - Advanced User Accounts
control desktop - Display Properties
control printers - Printers and Faxes
control mouse - Mouse Properties
control keyboard - Keyboard Properties
control netconnections - Network Connections
control color - Display Properties \ Screensaver
control date/time - Date and Time Properties
control schedtasks - Scheduled Tasks
control admintools - Administrative Tools
control telephony - Phone and Modem Options
control fonts - Fonts Folder
control international - Regional and Language