Boot Options

 Boot options
-------------------
If you are not booting multiple
operating systems, you can
turn off the option permanently,
until it is required. If
there is another OS on your
system, say LINUX, you
can reduce the amount of time
the option to choose which
OS to load is displayed. Rightclick
My Computer, click Properties
> Advanced and click the
Settings button under Startup
and Recovery. Here, you can
choose which operating system
to boot by default. You
can uncheck the boxes to
show the boot options, or
select the number of seconds
for which the choices are displayed.
Five seconds is usually
more than enough.
You will notice recovery
settings in case of a system failure.
Alerts and debugging
information will not be very
helpful for most users, so you
can turn these options off too.
_____________________________________

Choosing Performance

Choose performance
--------------------------
Windows XP has some very
good features to maximise
performance. Unfortunately,
the default settings are no
good. You can choose to have
it optimise itself for faster
computing. To change these
settings, click Start, rightclick
My Computer and click
Properties. Switch to the
Advanced tab and click the
Settings button under Performance.
By default, ‘Let Windows
choose what’s best for
my computer’ is selected.
Choose ‘Adjust for best performance’
instead, and you
will almost immediately
notice a boost in speed. This
is because all graphic effects
are turned off. You can
optionally choose each type
of effect that should be
enabled from here, but if it’s
power you are looking for,
leave them all off. Note that
the behaviour and appearance
of a lot of Windows such
as the Control Panel, will
become quite different. If you
prefer the helpful wizard-like
interfaces, you may want to
sacrifice a bit on performance
and enable the option to ‘Use
common tasks in folders’.
_____________________________________

By turning off display effects

 Turn off display effects
---------------------------------
Switching off transition and
animation effects can save a
lot of system resources. These
effects are not required to run
programs and cause an
unnecessary load on the
processor and RAM. Rightclick
on an empty area of the
desktop, click Properties and
switch to the Appearance tab.
Click Effects and clear all the
checkboxes.
__________________

By Changing the theme

(Tested on WINDOWS -XP PROFESSIONAL)

* Change the theme
-----------------------------
The default Windows XP
theme looks very pretty, but
hogs a lot of system resources
for the eye-candy effects such
as bevelled objects and transitions.
If looks are not important
to you, switch over to the
classic Windows look. To do
this, right-click an empty area
of the desktop and click Properties.
Under the Themes tab,
set Windows Classic as the
current theme and click OK.

By cleaning temporary files

* Temporary cleaner
------------------------------------
Regularly removing files that accumulate in the Temp folder can also show better performance—
these files are usually very small and unnecessarily fill up the hard
disk. This also causes high disk fragmentation and pushes important data towards the periphery of the
disk, where read/write operations are slower. Ideally, create a batch file that empties this folder and place it in the
Startup, so that it runs every time you boot to Windows.
You could do this from the autoexec.bat too, but this file runs while still in DOS mode, so disk access will be much 
slower than when in Windows.
You should strip all file attributes before running the delete command, since hidden and system files will not
be deleted from the Command Prompt. Also, using the deltree command instead of
del will ensure that even folders are deleted. Thus, your batch file should contain the
following commands:
attrib -a -s -r -h c:\Windows\
Temp\*.* /s
Deltree/y C:\Windows\
Temp\*

Using Defragmentation

* DEFRAGMANTING
----------------------------
Regularly defragmenting the hard disk maintains optimum performance for read/write operations. Hard disks store
data in sectors and clusters,the latter being the smallest addressable unit. Clusters are of a fixed size, depending on
the file system (FAT, FAT32,NTFS, etc). A cluster can hold only one file, but a file mayspan over several clusters.
For FAT32 partitions, the cluster size is 4 KB. Thus, any file between 0 bytes to 4 KB will occupy one cluster.
Should its size increase beyond 4 KB, it will look for the next free cluster to fill up.
With frequently changing files such as documents, spreadsheets, images, etc, the fragments of the file may
not be on contiguous clusters.
Reading and writing to such files spread all over the partition is obviously slow.
Defragmenting brings pieces of the file together, so that they are accessed faster.
All versions of Windows are bundled with defragmenting tools. In Windows 2000 and XP, you
can run it from Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
  OR  
rightclick My Computer and click Manage. Look for Disk Defragmenter under Storage