1. Wallpapers: They slow your whole system down, so if you're willing
to compromise, have a basic plain one instead!
2. Drivers: Update your hardware drivers as frequently as
possible. New drivers tend to increase system speed especially in the
case of graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very frequently!
3. Minimizing: If you want to use several programs at the same time
then minimize those you are not using. This helps reduce the overload on
RAM.
4. Boot Faster: The 'starting Windows 95/98' message on startup can
delay your booting for a couple of seconds. To get rid of this message go
to c:\ and find the file Msdos.sys. Remove the Read-Only
option. Next, open it in Notepad or any other text editor. Finally,
go to the text 'Options' within the file and make the following changes: Add
BootDelay=0. To make your booting even faster, set add Logo=0
to remove the Windows logo at startup.
5. Restart only Windows: When restarting your PC, hold down Shift
to only restart Windows rather than the whole system which will only take a
fraction of the time.
6. Turn Off Animations: Go to Display
Settings from the Control Panel and switch to the Effects Tab. Now
turn off Show Windows Content While Dragging and Smooth Edges on
Screen Fonts. This tip is also helpful with Windows XP because of the
various fade/scroll effects.
7. Faster Start-Menu Access: Go to the Start menu and
select Run. Now type Regedit and hit Enter. The
Registry Editor will appear on the screen. Now, open the folder HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control
Panel\Desktop. You should see a MenuShowDelay value. If
you don't then do the following: right click on a blank space in the right pane
and select New\String. Change the name in the new value to MenuShowDelay.
Now that we have the MenuShowDelay value, double click on it and enter 0
in the value data field. This sets the start menu delay to 0
milliseconds.
8. Resolutions: If you are willing to do anything for faster
performance from your PC, then try lowering your display resolution. The lower
it is, the faster your PC.
9. Turn off Active Desktop: Go to your Display
Properties and switch to the Web tab. Uncheck View My
Active Desktop As a Web Page. Since the Active Desktop option under
Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources, this option can have a dramatic
effect on the speed of the whole system.
10. Defragment Often: Windows 98's Defrag
tool uses Application Acceleration from Intel which means that when you
defragment your drive, data is physically arranged on the drive so that
applications will load faster.
