...starting with your operating system. Over the past few months, we here at qball.org have been giving some useful information to keeping our readers computers in peak performance, free of the spooky and dangerous internet. Granted, the readers may come as second thought to what we find useful ourselves, but be grateful anyways. Therefore, recently we needed to get more out of our Microsoft Windows XP operating system. There are plenty of Windows XP "tweaks" and optimization clicks all over the internet, and anyone who really wants to get serious can use the clicks at the end of this post. The improvements below are ones qball.org feel are easy to implement and make a vast improvement to the system.

note: Not every system reacts the same when tweaking individual items of the operation system. Be sure to backup Windows XP registry or create a restore point to access if things go wrong.

Here is what we advise for any reader who gets annoyed with some slow systems.

• Make DMA active on all drives - This will make sure your hard drive is operating at the fastest possible setting.
• Dramatically improve menu speeds - The default for XP menus are slower than need be. This will help get a quick response.
• Reduce size of the Recycle Bin - Right click Recycle Bin and slide the value to around 3% - 5%.
• Configure Windows Paging File System - This tweak really depends on the amount of memory and types of programs being ran on the system. This is a great article to get an idea of what needs to be done to speed up programs.
• Services - Here is where Windows XP suggests programs that need to be constantly running in the background, taking valuable system resources. Below is the list of what we advise to disable, but Black Viper's Service Guide explains every possible one to use.
  • Alerter
  • Automatic Updates
  • WMI Performance Adapter
  • UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply
  • Remote Registry
  • Secondary Logon

There are plenty of other tweaks that will help improve the operation system. Just to give a few clicks to read over:
Optimize XP
Extreme Tech
Tweaktown - this click has several guides ranging from beginning tweaks to advance improvements for Windows XP
Gaming Machine and XP - for the gamers who want to make sure all possible power is focused on destroying that guy from Brazil you are playing against online.

Just some helpful hints. Do not expect anymore tweaks on XP until we start to notice a slow down on our system again.