How to Speed Up Windows XP

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Chris Bryce from superservice.com and I would like to talk to you about how to speed up Windows XP. There is a couple of different ways to do this. A couple of them are kind of the mainstream ways of speeding up Windows XP but the other is kind of a hidden factor that a lot of people don't know. We'll go over that one first. A lot of people are surprised by the fact that fonts actually cause a lot of slow downs and a lot of bogging down of Windows XP. Fonts are loaded up when you start the computer and they can cause a lot of problems in the lagging of your system. So the key thing to do here is go into your fonts directory and either eliminate fonts that you don't need or eliminate fonts that are duplicates. Now some of the fonts that you might think are not duplicates actually are or sometimes even triplicates. I'll give you an example. If we take a font like aerial, if we take the aerial font there will be a font for aerial, there will be a font for aerial bold and another font for aerial italics. Some of your fonts may even have a separate font for the underlying version of the font. Well since most of the software programs that you are going to use to edit things that would require fonts like Microsoft Office, Word for example or Paint programs. Since those programs already have the feature for adding bold italics underline to the fonts you can eliminate the fonts that are in the fonts directory that you don't really need. So if you go in and remove those fonts you will be removing 50 to 75% of the fonts that are in there and your system will definitely run faster. Now for the separate things. A couple of other ways to speed up Windows XP are to add RAM or to replace your video card with an upgraded model. With the RAM aspect of things you can take the RAM and double it fairly un-expensively usually for under $100. If you have one gigabyte of RAM double it to two gigs. If you have 512 megs RAM go ahead and bump it up to one gigabyte of RAM. This will significantly increase the performance of your computer and make Windows XP a lot faster. On the video card side of things, if you can replace the video card you can take your video card from say 128 megabytes to 256 megabytes and this will dramatically increase the speed of your computer. They actually used to call video cards video accelerator cards. The reason for this was because just that, they accelerate your computer. But when you really think about it everything that is going on in your computer, all the processing and everything, at one point gets displayed on your monitor so all the processing you do ends up going through your video card and then being placed on the screen. This is where the video accelerator card comes in handy. So if you do those simple things you'll be able to make it a very much faster system for Windows XP."