Guide to Optimize Your PC

There are some basic steps that you can take to optimize the speed of your PC, without running optimization software. The tips introduced here are both easy to understand and easy to follow. They help keep your Windows operating system lean-n-mean by saving the mussels of your PC for real computing usage.

Step 1: Disable Windows Index Service
Similar to the way the index in a book helps you keep track of its contents, the index in Windows keeps track of the files on your computer. The index stores information about files, including the file name, date modified and properties like author, tags and rating. You will never see the index. But it is used by Windows to perform very fast searches of the most common files on your computer. If you don’t use search very often, the cost of keeping windows Index Service is questionable as it takes both CPU processing power and physical memory consumption. Unfortunately, you have no control over when Windows starts and stops its Indexing Service and thus it becomes annoying when your PC suddenly decides to launch an extensive Indexing Service while you are performing an important task.

Fortunately, you can tell PC to stop using Windows Index Service. On Windows Vista, go to "Control Panel" and click "Programs and Features". Click "Turn Windows features on or off" to see the "Windows Features" dialog box, which contains a list of features offered by the Windows operating system. All features are listed in alphabetical order with checkboxes indicating if they are turned on or off. Locate "Indexing Service" and make sure the matching checkbox is unselected. Click the "OK" button to exit the dialog box.

Step 2: Reduce the Number of Running Programs
"What you see is what you get" is definitely not true when it comes to how your PC manages its running applications, some of which are loaded in the background and run as processes. Some of these programs are not required to be executed until they are explicitly needed. To see what processes are actually running, open the Windows Task Manager and click the "Processes" tab. You will be surprised to see how many processes are running. The names of some of these processes are completely foreign to you.

To learn the details of each running process, select a process and open the "Properties" dialog box by choosing "Properties" from the context menu (by clicking the process with the right-mouse button). The "Properties" dialog box tells you almost everything you need to know about a running process. Pay attention to both the "General" and the "Details" tabs, from which you can learn what applications require these process to be running. Turn off those applications that are not needed will speed up your PC and save some consumption of your RAM.

Step 3: Simplicity Means Power
Sometimes, it is true that "Beauty is only skin deep" if you want to squeeze more power out of your PC. Windows operating systems devotes certain amount of its processing power and memory usage to maintain its various visual styles. What’s important to know is that this is done at cost of competing computing resource with other applications and processes that are currently running.

Luckily enough, you can always find a balance between "beauty" and "power" by making a few adjustments and modifications. The most trivial thing to do with a PC running Windows Vista is to turn off its Windows Aero color scheme which beautifies the appearance of Windows at the cost of consuming noticeable amount of computing power and resource. From Control Panel, click "Personalization" to open the "Personalize appearance and sounds" window. Click "Window Color and Appearance" and select "Open classic appearance properties for more color options" to display the "Appearance Settings" dialog box. From this dialog box, you can select, from the "Color scheme" list box, a different color scheme like "Windows Vista Basic" or "Windows Standard", which consumes less computing resource. Click Ok or Apply to commit the change. Furthermore, you can turn off a few more visual effects to reduce consumption of processors and RAM. From the "Appearance Settings" dialog box, click the "Effects" button to open the "Effects" dialog box. You can turn all the visual effects presented in the dialog box off without impeding the user experience of your daily computing needs.

Step 4: Even Shakespeare Had Only a Few Fonts
Do you know that a typical Windows Vista PC is loaded with over 400 fonts? Some of us who are more artistic or creative may have a lot more fonts installed along with the default ones. Although some said that Windows can handle as many as 1,000 fonts but, again, this is not done without impeding the performance of your PC. The reality is that Windows never warn you about when it reaches the limit of loading fonts before you notice the declined performance of your PC.

To trim your font collection, create a backup folder somewhere else other than the default font folder. You can locate this folder from the Control Panel by click the "Fonts" button or simply point your Explore to [c:\Windows\Fonts]. Backup the entire font directory first and then delete from the original font folder those fonts that you would never use. Restart your PC to make the changes effective.

Step 5: An Expensive Digital Photo Frame
Most of us use our favorite pictures and photos as desktop backgrounds. Given the high-resolutions of photos that we take nowadays, a certain chunk of your PC’s memory is consumed by loading and displaying the background image. If you don’t have to stare at the background images while working on your computer, why not just replacing it with a solid display made of your favorite choice of color?

From Control Panel, click "Personalize" to open "Personalize appearance and sounds" window. Click "Desktop Background", choose "Solid Colors" from the "Picture Location" dropdown menu, and click Ok.

Further Optimize Your PC
Here we present you with a set of basic things that you can do to tune up your PC without installing or using software. There are more advanced techniques that you can perform to further optimize the performance of your PC. For instance, maintaining a clean Windows Registry to free up Registry storage and to speed up Registry access both of which lead to noticeable enhancements of PC performance. Defragment your hard drive to make file access more efficient and thus reduce both system and program startup time. Reassess the startup program list to ensure only necessary and critical programs are loaded when Windows starts. This list goes on and on. Nevertheless, tweaking Windows manually without advanced operating systems knowledge can only harm and even destroy Windows installation. We only recommend you perform these optimization tasks with the help of tested and trustworthy software applications.