When Vista first came out I was ecstatic because it looked so awesome with it’s slick task bars and the very overrated ‘Aero’ feature however, the tables have turned. After a week of using Vista I saw that it wasn’t right for me. I won’t go into details but it was full of horse manure. It couldn’t run the programs I wanted it to run without crashing and I won’t even get started with the DLL errors.

But lets get to the point, lots of people with XP also have errors in Vista but this is bound to happen, especially if you’ve been running it for months or even years on end without giving it the routine clean-up and optimization. Overtime things do eventually get ‘rusty’ and require attention, not in a few days though like Vista. I’m going to share some tips on how to keep your XP install squeaky clean and daisy fresh for longer .

Disk Defragmentation

For the people who don’t know, disk defragmentation is basically a little piece of software you run which cleans up your system and organizes it. For example, if one part of your Microsoft Word document is in China and the rest of it is in England, it’s not very accessible is it? It will take you time to ‘get it together’ and start using it. Don’t worry, hopefully this won’t ever happen to you but it’s a metaphor for what can happen to your hard disk. As you start using your computer for your general everyday activities things start to mess up and small sectors of your files start to go all over the place which makes your computer slow when trying to access them.

This is where disk defragmentation comes in, it brings all these ‘lost’ sectors together and organizes them so it makes it easier for your computer to access them the next time you open it. It stores the files closer together and contiguously. Disk defragmentation will also attempt to create bigger regions of free space by compacting files.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what disk defragmentation is, I’ll show you how to do it on a machine running on Microsoft Windows XP.

Click on ‘Start’ and then click on ‘All Programs’. You should see quite a big list of programs installed on your computer. At the top look for ‘Accessories’ and then click on ‘System tools’ and finally, click on ‘Disk Defragmenter’. The disk defragmentation window should now open. Click on ‘Analyze’ and wait for it to analyze the volume and see if it needs defragmentation. More often than not, it will say ‘You should defragment this volume’. If it does, click ‘Defragment’ and then just wait for it to do it’s magic. On machines with lots of programs and files it can take a long time but trust me, it’s worth it.

Switch to Windows Classic

We all know it’s nice to have a nice looking start menu and task bars but think to yourself, do you really need it? It’s a bit like Vista, aesthetically it looks great but under the hood it’s like a 1950s automobile, slow and rusty. Fine, if you have a computer with 8GB ram a great Quad Core processor and maybe even a ATI Radeon graphics card, you have the resources to run it but what about the people with 512MB ram trying to run Firefox with about 15 tabs and Adobe Photoshop at the same time (it’s not me if that’s what your thinking!)? Switching to classic will save you tonnes of resources as it’s a simple user interface which isn’t as demanding.

Switching is simple, go to your desktop, right click and then press ‘properties’. Under the ”Themes’ tab there should be a drop down list showing you what themes you have, select ‘Windows Classic’ and then press ‘OK’. You’ll soon start to notice the difference of you computing
Who needs a wallpaper?

A wallpaper may also be aesthetically pleasing, as would a nice theme but again… Who needs it? It’s simply another burden on your resources and for what, so whenever you log on you can look at a photo of Eminem? LOL.

Just get rid of it, there’s no point. To do this simple right click on your desktop, select ‘properties’ and then click on the ‘Desktop’ tab. Scroll to the top of the backgrounds list and then select ‘(None)’. You can then select the colour you want instead of a background, I chose a nice blue which is good to the eyes but also allows me to see all of my desktop icons without squinting. Hex Code: 3a6ea5.

Look around for unused programs now and again

From the moment you install Windows XP on your computer you are probably going to start installing programs. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that but we’ve all got to admit that sooner or later we start to install programs we don’t really need. For example, I installed Adobe Flash when I don’t know how to use it. But why did I install it? It’s because I thought that I could try and learn it and it might be useful someday but it wasn’t, not to me anyway LOL.

The best way to go about this problem is to every month or so go through all your programs and see which ones you don’t need and simply uninstall them. The best way to do it is to click on ‘Start’ then click on ‘Control Panel’ and you’ll see a load of little icons to things, if you only see two columns the click on ‘Classic View’ on the left hand side. After you do that click on ‘Add and Remove Programs’. This is a simple application built into XP which allows you to see which programs are installed on your computer. It also shows some useful information such as how frequently they are used etc. You should then just start scrolling through them and if you find a program that you’ve not used or don’t need then uninstall it.

This will really help speed up your computer as some of these programs will sometimes add unnecessary programs to the startup files and of course take up valuable hard drive space.

Don’t use warez!

One of the number one reasons why people get their computers infected with some really nasty viruses, spyware etc. is because they try and get all the goodies for free! The real answer to this dilemma is don’t! Most people who upload this ‘free’ stuff often also sneakily add spyware, viruses, keyloggers etc. Most of the time they just do it for the fun of it but some of the time it’s just an accident because they are also warez downloaders who are infected!

Be very careful when downloading applications of the Internet, try and use trused websites like Download.com, they are probably the Internet’s biggest download site but they are 100% ligit and their downloads are 100% safe! You don’t have to use warez to get free software downloads, there is always a free and very good alternative to softwares.

Another one, never ever under any circumstance visit a dodgy website, they are likely to infect your computer massively as soon as you make a click on your mouse and if they don’t do they are will probably bombard you will their affiliate links and popup ads.

Always visit Jowki.com!

I ust had to throw this one in . Always visit Jowki.com as I’ll be providing more news every day of the week, 52 weeks of the year. So, what are your ways of keeping your XP daisy fresh?

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