by admin on March 1, 2010
In Windows XP lots of documents that you’ve recently opened get stored in the “My Recent Documents” folder on your startup menu.
Now, this is a useful part of the startup menu but the problem with it is that it slows down the whole process of booting up your computer. It can get really long as well, especially if you’re openeing and closing lots of different programmes.
Another good reason to start managing this is that you might be using a machine that other people use and you don’t want them to be able to see the files that you’ve recently opened.
So how do you clean your ‘My Recent Documents’ up?
Right click on the ’start’ menu and then click on ‘Properties’. Then click on ‘Customise’ and then ‘Advanced’ in the tab at the top which should open. Then all you need to do is click the ‘Clear List’ button and it’s done.
Hopefully you found that simple enough. If that was the problem affecting your startup you might now notice a significant improvement in your statup speed.
by admin on March 1, 2010
One fast and simple way to speed up your PC is to turn off indexing on Windows, both XP and Vista. This is a really great and often overlooked way to speed up your PC’s performance.
If you turn off Windows indexing it means you won’t be able to use Windows search. This isn’t such a big deal though, if you want to search your computer then you can use Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop, both are great, super fast, and won’t slow down your computer.
How to Turn Off Indexing
In ‘My Computer’ right click on your local drive which could be C or D or whatever it’s called. From there click on ‘Properties’ and in the general tab you’ll see a check box which says ‘Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching’ at the bottom.
Uncheck that box and you should get a pop up box that asks you if you want to use those setting on all sub folders and files or just the root. You want to apply this to all files and subfolders because you don’t want anything indexed. It will take a while once you’ve done this because all files and folders would have already been set up to be indexed so it’ll have to go in and change all the settings.
Hopefully you found that quite simple to do. Remember that it’s simple things like this that can make a real difference to the speed of your computer. Now Windows won’t be indexing all your files and so it saves your computer some energy which will give you more speed and efficiency when you are using your PC.
You also don’t have to turn off indexing for every drive. You can have it running for one drive and not the other which is really useful because you will still see some improvements in efficiency but you’ll still be able to index the drives you really need to be indexed.