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Many people are interested in making the most of their hardware. So here are 10 simple tips on how to make your Windows XP computer run faster without having to purchase additional hardware.

1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data – One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. Disk fragmentation really can slow down your computer. Just go to accessories and find a dusty fragments are and let that run. It might take all afternoon, but it should speed up your machine. There are also several paid apps available as well.

2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors – Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors can severly hurt disk performance. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It will meticulously search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for better performance.

3. Disable Indexing Services – Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. It’s very annoying. It also doesn’t work as well as Google Desktop for searching your files. Disable it fast and speed up your machine.

4. Optimize Display Settings – Windows XP is a looker. But it costs you system resources that are used to display all the visual items and effects. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave only a few necessary bells and whistles. Use a simpler theme or turn off some of the destop effects. Another option is to run fewer programs that are graphically intense.

5. Speedup Folder Browsing – You may have noticed that everytime you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay. To fix this and to increase browsing speed, you can disable the “Automatically search for network folders and printers” option. Most of us don’t have network drives and network printers attach your computer. Anyways. So these options are completely useless.

6. Disable Performance Counters – Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. These utilities take up system resources so disabling is a good idea.

7. Optimize Your Pagefile – You can optimize your pagefile. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile. Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have more than 1GB of memory, you probably can set the page file at 512MB or 1GB and that is more than enough.

8. Remove Fonts for Speed – Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require. Unless you are a gfx designer, you shouldn’t need 1,000 fonts. That’s just silly.

9. Use a Flash Memory to Boost Performance – To improve performance, you need to install additional RAM memory. It’ll let you boot your OS much quicker and run many applications and access data quicker. On vista you can use a program called ReadyBoost to do this, on XP programs like eBoost can help. unfortunately, while there is some benefit from what I’ve read, this is not going to give you a huge boost in speed or performance. Built-in RAM is usually going to help more, up to about 2GB, after that you see diminishing returns.

10. Perform a Boot Defragment – There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster. On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, if not, enable it.

I hope this article help you improve your computer’s performance. Even just a little. here’s a bonus tip for you if you browse the web or a lot, you should check out Google’s new browser is the fastest browser currently available and could really speed up your Web applications as well.