Display Settings and Paging File

Display Settings

The Display is one of the components that eat lots of resources without any clear use. Why would you want to have visual effects if they decrease the speed of your computer?

Let’s start by changing the theme. This is the first step to increasing your computer’s performance. Go to your Desktop, right click anywhere in the open area (not on icons) and, from the drop down menu, click on Properties. Go to the Themes tab and you will see under the Theme setting that it is set to Windows Xp theme. This theme uses lots of resources, memory and processing for nothing. So we will change it to Windows Classic and click Apply. Windows Classic theme will make your desktop look like the original windows.

Now, it’s time to check out the Screensaver tab. Screensavers were originally created to stop screen burn in. Burn in occurred in older monitors when you left your computer on too long with the same image. When you turned it off, you could still see your icons on the screen. In reality, this does not occur anymore today due to advances in technology. So why waste precious resources for a useless thing? Go ahead and change your screensaver to None, click Apply, and then click OK to close the window.

It is time to get rid of all the resource-consuming visual effects. Go to the Advance tab and under Performance click on Settings. On the Visual Effects tab you can see all the visual effects Windows Xp has to offer (like the shadow under your cursor). If you allow Windows to choose what is best for your computer, it will still keep its precious visual effects, lowering performance. So we are going to select Adjust for best performance, and click Apply. This action will stop all the fancy visual effects.

Paging File settings

Go to the Start menu, right click My Computer, and choose Properties. On the General tab, towards the bottom, you will see what kind of CPU you are using and how much RAM you have. Write down the amount of RAM. Now go to the Advance tab, under Performance Options. Here, we are going to need the information you wrote down. Click Change under the Virtual Memory section.

Virtual memory is basically a page file that is used to write information that is not needed in RAM at the moment. This file does not need to be larger than the amount of RAM you have. It is recommended that you make the Max size the same number as your Initial size. Your Initial size needs to be twice the amount of RAM you have. If you have 512MB of RAM then the Initial size would be 1024MB. If you have 1024MB of RAM then the Initial size would be 2048MB. Change your Max size, select Set, and click OK. When Windows asks to restart your computer, go ahead and restart to complete the process.

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