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.

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.

When you’re looking to speed up your PC one of the first things you should look at is Defragmenting your hard drive.

Simply put, Defragmenting your PC is like organising everything much more effectively than it was before. If your computer can go stright to a file when it’s needed rather than sort through lots of other files, often files that you might never use and are unneccessary, then it becomes a real problem and can slow your computer down considerably.

So how do you go about Defragmenting your Computer?

Probably the best thing to do for users who aren’t computer experts but know their way around their computer a little bit is to buy a programme to Degragment your hardrive on your PC. You can buy some software called Diskeeper which does the job very well and you don’t have to learn any special commands to work on your PC yourself.

If you don’t want to pay for software you can use the free Windows Defrag tool which does do the job. Maybe not as simply as third party software but then if you don’t have the budget for software you might want to choose this option.

The are also other free programmes. SmartDefrag is free and it seems like the software is pretty good. Maybe better and more user friendly than the Windows Defrag solution you have built in.

It’s really about trial and error and finding the solution that is right for you and your computer. Software such as SartDefrag has had good reviews and it compares very well to piad Defragmentors like Diskeeper but it’s all about how you the user feel with the programme.

Defragmenting your PC is one of the initial steps you want to look at when you are thinking about improving the performance and speed of your PC. Get the process right and you might feel like you have a PC that is like new. If you want a faster and more efficient POC experience then get Defragmenting!

Another great way to speed up your PC’s performance is to delete unused and temporary files. It’s a simple process and the best way to go about it is to use a programme called CCleaner.

CCleaner makes it really easy to manage your files because you can clean up old files very quickly and simply in no time at all.

With CCleaner the worry might be that because it’s so efficient at cleaning up files it might clean and remove too many files, especially files that you actually use. Well, this isn’t the case, the programme is clever because it makes sure that it doesn’t touch files that are needed, which is very useful and a great “safety” feature to have.

CCleaner also lets you uninstall prgrammes very simply and takes the hassle away from the long process that it used to be. Now it can be done with a few clicks of the mouse rather than having to wait for screens to load which is why most people give up and become disillusioned when they try to delete old files. There are often so many files, and wading through them all can be tedious at best.

As well as cleaning up your systems files, CCleaner will also remove your online history which is something else that can slow down your computer, often quite considerably. This programme makes it simple to delete files in one go rather than having to go into differnet areas of your system to ultimately do the same job.

CCleaner is another addition to your tool kit for improving the speed of your PC and definitley one that shouldn’t be overlooked. As usual, it can often be one simple solution like this that makes the difference between a faster PC rather than a slow one.

When your computer boots up a lot of the time it takes too boot is used up by loading different fonts.

A great way to speed up the amount of time it takes for your computer to load is to move the fonts that you really never use into another folder. Just make sure that the fonts really are ones you never use because when you move them you won’t be able to use them in Windows programmes like Word or Notepad.

If you’re like most people you only use a few fonts. Most people just use Microsoft Word for word processing and have no need for designing anything else. If you are a more advanced user and use a lot of fonts then this solution won’t be for you.

Fonts Folder in the Control Panel

You can find the Fonts folder in the control panel. Just open a new folder from the desktop and highlight the fonts you don’t use and put them into the new folder. It’s really simple and could speed your systems load times considerably.

It doesn’t really matter how much work you do on your PC, eventually it will start to get slower than you want. The more memory you use on your PC and the space all your files take up will definitely have an impact on the performance of your computer, but luckily there are things that can be done about it.

Here are a few things you can do to make your PC faster.

Clean up Your Computers Hard Drive
This is quite a simple thing to do and you might notice a considerable improvement in your PC’s performance. Some great ways to do this are to reduce the size of your computer’s recycle bin (there’s no need for it to be large and hold lots of files that you have deleted).

You can turn off System Restore which doesn’t always need to be turned on. You might think it’s useful if something goes wrong but it really isn’t. It’s only useful for resoring windows files so any other files that are lost won’t be saved anyway.

You might know this already but a great way to speed up your computers performance, especially when browsing the internet is to delete some of the temporary internet files you have. Having all the websites you’ve visited in the temporary file clogs it up and slows down performance.

Clean Your Registry

This is a great, simple thing to do. It removes broken files and simply put, bits and pieces that are lying around on your sytem that need to be cleaned up, that are causing it to slow down. Using a Registry Cleaner could be a really simple solution to your problems.

Remove Spyware

Another simple thing you can do. Spyware that has collected on your system can really slow it down. You can remove it simply with a number of programmes.

Your My Documents Folder

Move the location of your My Documnets folder so it’s on a separate hard drive. My Documents stores a lot of info so moving it away can save a lot of space and might improve the performance of your system.

Optimise Windows Boot Time

You can use a free programme called Bootvis from Microsoft to do this.

There are so many different ways to speed up your computer. Maybe just using one or two of the solutions above might work for you. It might not though, so you could have to go through a few of them to find the right solution for your PC.