In this part of the Speed up your PC series we’ll be looking at a couple of tweaks that will help to optimise the performance of the PC.
Stop Indexing
Windows uses the index to perform very fast searches on your computer. By default , the Windows Search indexing service is turned on for all local hard drives. Turning off indexing is a simple way to increase performance.
By turning off indexing on the hard drives is another very simple way to boost the computer’s performance.
Turning off the indexing service will do no hard to your computer. It will not stop searching for any document on the hard disk, however turning off indexing to speed up your computer!
Here’s how you do it: First, open My Computer and right-click on your local drive (C, D, etc) and choose Properties
On the General tab, there is a checkbox at the bottom called “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties”.
Uncheck that and click OK. A popup dialog box will be displayed asking whether to apply these settings to all files and folders or just to the root of the drive:
Choose all files and subfolders, otherwise it’s going to still index everything on the drive! Click OK. This operation may take a few moments as the settings are applied to all the files on the disk. Unfortunately, every file in the file system has an attribute that tells Windows whether or not it should be indexed, so this has to be updated for all files.
If you get any Access Denied errors along the way, just go ahead and click Ignore All because it’s probably just system files that are currently in use.
Cut Down on the Visual Effects
In Windows 7 there are a number of Visual Effects that make the Windows appear “much nicer”, but this comes at a cost to the computer performance. If you are not concerned about the some or all of the fancy visual effects in Windows, you can turn them off by going to Performance Options. Windows includes some stunning effects, but if you more speed is needed the settings for the appearance of Windows on the computer can be customised.
Click the Start button , type Performance Information and Tools in the search box, and then click Performance Information and Tools in the list of results.
- Open the Control Panel
Click on the “Start Button” and select Control Panel from the menu. - Select the Performance and information command
OR
If using Category view in the Control Panel Select “System and Security” then the “Check Windows Experience Index” command.
- The Performance and and Information dialog box is now open. Click Adjust visual effects, from the menu. Here you can decide if you want to let Windows choose what’s best for your computer, adjust for best appearance, or adjust for best performance.
- Select The “Adjust for best performance option” to allow Windows to turn off the unnecessary, or high usage functions
See the earlier articles in this series:
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