There are a few little things that you can do with your Windows XP installation that will improve it's performance. These include speeding up the boot time, shutdown time, and just overall general session experience.

Now a couple of these are straight forward, these Windows XP tweaks can be performed by most users, with a bit of experience. Some of the other's involve getting into the registry to make a few changes. If you don't know what a registry is, and the general outline and purpose of it, then I don't recommend that you go in there at all. Making a mistake inside the registry, in the wrong area or changing the wrong value, can have catastrophic repercussions on your operating system. So please, remember I said, "If you don't know what a registry is, it's purpose etc., DON"T GO IN THERE!!" There is my warning, I'm no longer responsible!! If perhaps you would still like to have a faster machine, and you are feeling uncomfortable with your saviness, ooh that's a cool word, saviness! I mean your not feeling as computer savvy as maybe you would like, then find somebody that does have a lot more experience with computers, and might be comfortable with places such as the registry. Here we go!

Windows XP Repair-Tweak No.1 1. To start off with, were going to start right from the desktop, no programs open. First we want to get into the properties of My Computer.

Click Start, and find the My Computer Icon in the menu. To get into the properties of My Computer, simply right click the icon, then choose properties, from the drop down menu.

In the properties box you will see a series of tabs. These are General , Computer Name, Hardware etc. The tab that were interested in here is the Advanced tab.

Open up the advanced tab. Incidentally, you will have to have administrative privileges on the computer that you are working on to make most of these changes. With that said, and with the Advanced tab opened up you will see three main categories in which you can access.

These are Performance, User Profiles and Startup and Recovery.

In the Performance area, click settings. In here we are just going to make a couple of changes.

As you can see there are four bullet points:

Let Windows choose what's best for my computer??

Adjust for best appearance

Adjust for best performance

Custom

Normally, in here I will choose Custom, and deselect everything in the list of graphic features, except for the very last two.

Use dropdown shadows for icon labels on desktop

Use visual styles on windows and buttons

Leaving the last two of these options checked still gives you a visually nice desktop, and you can still see visual styles on your windows and buttons.

Once you have made these changes go to the bottom of the Visual Effects tab and click Apply.

As for all of the one's that were left unchecked, most of these will use up memory because of the graphic nature of them, but for most users, if you didn't know what they did, you wouldn't miss them anyway. But having them unchecked will speed up your overall system performance by a smidge.

Alright, so that's the first part of Windows XP Repair-Tweak No.1.

For the next part, while we are in the properties of My Computer, on the Advanced tab, let's look down towards the bottom, and you will see the button Error Reporting.

Click Error Reporting and get into the window that opens up and disable error reporting by putting a check mark in the Disable Error Reporting box.

Error reporting is much the same as, "Your computer has performed an illegal action", from back in the Windows 98 days. Basically, your computer did something that your operating system didn't understand. Only now, Microsoft wanted you to report it to them. Frankly I don't see the point and also, this is mostly annoying more than anything, so go ahead and disable it, trust me, your not missing anything.

Thanks for now, please find part 2 in the database under my name:

Davin Ogden

LuvComputer's PC Repair