Five easy steps to speed up your Windows seven computer.
Faster Window Switching
Disabling the minimise/maximise animation can make your PC run much faster. Disabling it is easy:
- Go to Start and type in “SystemPropertiesPerformance”
- Go the visual effects tab
- Uncheck ‘Animate windows when minimizing and maximising‘ and click OK
Speedup Windows 7 Boot Times
Windows 7 only uses one core to boot out of the box. By increasing the number of cores used you can decrease the boot time:
- Click on Start and then ‘Run’
- Search for Run and type ‘msconfig’
- Click on the tab ‘Boot’ and click on ‘Advanced options…’
- Check ‘Number of processors’ and enter how many your PC has (usually 2,4 or
- Click ‘OK’ and ‘Apply’
- Reboot
Remove Unwanted Fonts
Fonts, mostly TrueType fonts, use a lot of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require.
- Open Control Panel
- Open Fonts folder
- Move fonts you don’t need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain.
SpeedUp Windows 7 Shutdown Time
Windows 7 shutsdown a lot faster than Vista or XP, but it can be improved further by making a change to the registry to reduce the time Windows waits to kill processes:
- Click on Start and type in “regedit” and hit Enter
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControl
- Right-click onWaitToKillServiceTimeOut and change and lower the value
- The default is 12000 (12 seconds) but you can lower this to any number
- Click ok and restart PC
Disable Search Indexing
For me the Search Indexing feature is a total waste of time. It uses up quite a lot of resources and is one feature I’d recommend most users disabling:
- Click on Start and type in services.msc
- Find and right-click ‘Windows Search’
- In the startup type field choose ‘Disabled’
