TUNE UP WINDOWS
Discover more tips, tricks, and tweaks that you can use in Windows to deliver even more speed improvements to your machine
You’ve cleaned up your PC, but there’s still lots of room for improvement. If it’s still struggling on a day-to-day basis—particularly if it has 2GB of RAM or less—it’s worth exploring additional ways to free up more resources by optimizing which services ( low-level processes) are running in the background.
Doing this by hand is tricky and timeconsuming, which is where Easy Services Optimizer ( www.sordum.org/?p=8637) comes in. This makes it easy to disable a range of services safely to recover the resources you need. Once downloaded, you can quickly tweak your system one of four ways: Default (your existing setup); Safe (a good choice for most); Tweaked; and Extreme. The higher up you go, the more likely it is you’ll lose functionality, such as support for printers or Bluetooth devices. If an option doesn’t work, roll back to Default.
If you’d rather temporarily suspend resources while running a specific app—a game, say—try JetBoost ( www.bluesprig. com/jetboost.html) instead. Once installed, launch the program, and click the big blue button to shut down services. Run your app, then after closing it, click “Restore” to put things back the way they were.
Advanced users can click “Customize” to add custom processes, services (typically non-Windows services, but avoid key ones such as security software), and “other,” which includes ensuring your power settings are set to high performance.
Tune Up Search
If you’re not averse to keeping documents and other files outside your key user folders,
chances are Windows takes a long time to find them when you perform a search—if they’re found at all. Let Windows add these locations to its index, and future searches will be much quicker. Open File Explorer in Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, and click inside the “Search” box to open the context-sensitive “Search” tab on the Ribbon. Click “Advanced options,” and choose “Change indexed locations.” Windows 7 users should type “indexing” into the “Start” menu’s search box, and click “Indexing Options.”
From here, click “Modify” to add the folders containing your files to the index— also consider removing those locations you don’t need indexed, to keep things streamlined. Once done, Windows takes some time to index the new locations fully— this is much quicker on SSDs, obviously.
If you’ve partitioned your drive, move your search index off your Windows system drive, and you’ll be able to easily restore it after reinstalling Windows in the future. To do this, click “Advanced,” followed by “Select New” under “Index location,” to choose another drive or partition to put it.
Optimize Memory Settings
The following tweaks aren’t necessary if your PC is packed with RAM or you’re running an SSD, but they help PCs with 2GB or less running 32-bit Windows on a regular hard drive. You need a USB 2.0 or better flash drive with 4GB of free space, enabling you to use the spare capacity on larger drives for other purposes. Windows should be able to automatically detect when you’ve plugged it in, and offer to use all or some of it for ReadyBoost. If not, open File Explorer, right-click the USB drive, and choose “Properties > ReadyBoost tab.”
The second tweak requires that your PC has two internal hard drives—both non-SSD. It enables you to move your paging file—which Windows uses for virtual memory—to the second drive, which can also give overall performance a boost. Press Win-Pause/Break, click “Advanced system settings,” switch to the “Performance” tab, and click “Settings.” Switch to the “Advanced” tab, and click “Change.”
Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives,” then select your current Windows drive (usually drive C). Choose “Custom,” and enter “800” into both the “Initial” and “Maximum Size” boxes, before clicking “Set.” This 800MB file is required to enable Windows to boot. Now select your second drive (or—if it’s been partitioned—the least-used partition on that drive), and choose “System managed size.” Click “Set” again, then click “OK” three times, and reboot. Once done, return to this screen to verify the correct settings are in place (800MB for drive C; and “System managed” for your second drive). This should lead to improvements in your PC’s performance.