Often, the reason we want to upgrade our computers is in hope that after the upgrade, it would perform better and also much faster. However, what we normally miss out is that after sometime, without proper care, our computer will automatically slow down by itself due to the amount of data that has already been cataloged inside. While most of the time we point towards the direction of improving your RAM, cleaning off your registry to speed up your computer, have you ever thought of customizing your operating system to improve speed performance?

Windows XP is considered one of the most stabilized system, especially if you compare it with Vista, thus making it easily ?tweakable?. Here are a few tips to help you speed up your Windows XP.

1. Switch off your Windows Index Service

If you have noticed, most of the time when your computer is idle, its hard drive tends to make a lot of noise despite you not running any programs. This is because your files in your computer are being indexed so as to help the CPU find them easier. It may seem as a good thing and it is, however, the problem comes because your indexing system does not filter the programs and files it indexes, thus it basically index everything even the most unimportant files. This severely strains the working performance of the computer despite it making stuff easier for Windows. Take these steps to switch off your index service.

a. Go to My Computer, roll over your pointer on the View menu and go to Explorer Bar and click Search

b. Click on Change Preferences before clocking on Without Indexing Service

c. Click No to not enable Indexing Service and finally click OK.

2. Use NTFS to hasten your hard drive

Windows XP does offer the option to configure your NTFS hard drive which would result in better compression, higher amounts of security and essentially, higher grade encryption. Despite the benefits of a much faster hard drive, however you may need to provide your computer with a little more space as the conversion from FAT to NTFS would require more space in your computer. To switch to the NTFS system in your computer, you just have to follow these steps.

a. First click on Start

b. After which, click on Run

c. Type in cmd and hit the Enter key

d. At the command prompt, type ?convert X:/FS:NTFS? where X is the letter of your hard drive

e. Hit Enter to end the procedure

3. Disable all unnecessary startups

Sometimes, the slow performance of your computer can be a result of your inability to manage your own programs and processes. Windows XP allows its user to have complete control over what programs they load into its configuration and surprisingly, we only require 6 vital programs to keep our program running, yet more often than not, we find that our computers are running dozens as soon as we start it up. Thus, we only have ourselves to blame for its slow performance. Start to manage your startup configuration through these steps.

1. First, you click Start

2. Then you click Run

3. Next, type in ?msconfig.exe? into the box

4. Under "system configuration utility", click the "service" or "startup" tab

5. Proceed to uncheck the boxes of the programs you do not wish to use

6. Finally, click on the OK button

These are just some basic tips to help your improve the speed of your computer especially if you are a WindowsXP user. No doubt there are more than just these 3 methods, but these are considered the easier to carry out.