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Top Ten Advanced Windows Care Tips

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 15 July 2008 )

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Top Ten Advanced Windows Care Tips

When it comes to Windows Operating System, many computer users are delighted to learn helpful shortcuts, power-saving tips, and ways to improve speed that makes their overall experiences more productive and efficient. Some users even buy software, such as Uniblue Registry Booster, to boost their computers performance. However, at the most time, you may improve your computer's performance with the following ten advanced Windows care tips to make the most out of your activities for both business and leisure.

1. Optimize Paging File

A paging file located on your hard disk is used by Windows XP to store information associated with insufficient RAM memory. Since hard disk access is generally slower than RAM access, optimizing your paging file is highly suggested. This will come in quite handy when you are working on a word document too large for your computer's RAM.

2. Optimize Display Settings

Impressive graphics may decorate your computer screen and make it more attractive, but it also affects performance, which is especially detrimental to an older PC. To experiment with changes, try the following steps: click on the Start button, right-click on My Computer, select Properties, choose the Advanced tab, click on the Settings button located under Performance, choose the Visual Effects tab and select "Adjust for Best Performance" and click OK.

3. Double-Click Title Bars

When you double-click on a window's title bar, the full screen size makes editing much easier and quicker. This also helps to eliminate unnecessary scrolling.

4. Utilize Quick Launch

To gain easy and speedy access to your most-used dial-up connections and favorite folders – make sure to utilize Quick Launch. Overall, you can fit about 20 items on the Quick Launch bar.

5. Rely on Convenient Buttons

Spend less time fussing with Windows by reducing the amount of dependency and use of your mouse movement. For example, you may right-click on the taskbar to close windows or when you wish to close a program or window running in the foreground, you can press Alt + F4.

6. Sleep and Hibernate

Completely shutting down and rebooting your computer is a waste of time and energy, which is why many users rely on "Sleep" and "Hibernate," which allows them to keep their favorite programs open. It is suggested to save all work and close a few documents when placing a machine in Sleep or Hibernate mode.

7. Right-Click Shortcuts

Life is much easier and quicker when you learn the common right-click shortcuts that increase computer performance and output. Shortcuts are known to allow easy copying (Ctrl+C), easy pasting (Ctrl+V), easy email reply (Ctrl+R), and ease looking for words and phrases in documents and on the Internet (Ctrl+F).

8. Disable Recent Documents History

With Window XP, there is a feature that permits a user to keep track of all recent documents that have been opened or used. When you select the Start/Recent Documents History, documents are quickly reopened, but when Windows is rebooted, the overall process slows as the computer tries to figure out the items situated in the History. Disabling the Recent Documents History is suggested to boost speed.

9. Reduce Wait Time

Before you shut down Windows XP, the computer first quits or ends the live applications or processes that are currently running. Closing all applications before shutting down the computer is suggested, which will decrease the amount of time that Windows XP has to wait before these instances are closed internally.

10. Set Your Computer to Automatically Kill Tasks Upon Shutdown

Dialog boxes that ask if you wish to "kill" an application that is currently running is known to slow down computer shutdowns. Instead of waiting for prompts, you can set Windows XP to automatically take care of this task by: opening the Registry Editor, locating HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop, highlighting the value AutoEndTasks (changing the value to 1), and closing the Registry Editor.
　

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 15 July 2008 )