89. Use the Bootvis utility

It's a little known fact that Microsoft actually produced its own free utility to help speed up Windows XP boot times. Bootvis was its name, and although they later removed it from their site and claimed it was simply a design utility and would not help speed up the average PC, many XP users thought differently, enough to keep the software alive on the net. The Bootvis utility is available here. Try it out and decide for yourself!

To use Bootvis download and install the program, then run it.

Go to the 'trace' menu and select 'next boot and driver delays.'
Bootvis will prompt to reboot. Reboot and wait for Bootvis to start again.

Go to the 'trace' menu and select 'optimize.' Reboot again. Wait for Bootvis to complete its analysis. Your boot times should now be optimized.

90. Use the Intel application accelerator

If your computer has an older Intel chipset (pre-865) you may benefit from downloading and installing the Intel Application Accelerator . This software replaces the Windows XP ATA (hard disk and IDE device) drivers with ones specially designed for Intel chipsets, improving disk performance and boot time.

Please make sure that your computer conforms to the system requirements before installing the accelerator.

91. Disable unnecessary services

Windows XP runs many, many services in the background. A lot of these are not actually necessary to the day-to-day operation of your PC, depending of course, on what you use it for.

The simple fact is different people will need different services enabled. To judge for yourself which are necessary, right click on 'My computer' and select 'manage.' From the computer management window, expand 'services and applications' then click 'services' to open up the window listing all available services.

The ones labeled 'started' are currently running, and the startup type 'automatic' denotes a service which is started by windows each time the operating system loads. By highlighting each service, you can see a description of its properties, and make an informed decision on whether you need it or not.

To stop a service from running, right click on it and select 'properties,' then stop it and make the startup type 'disabled.' If the description indicates that services which depend on the service you are currently examining will fail if it is disabled, you can go to the 'dependencies' tab to see which services will be affected.

Good luck, and use common sense. See our tip below on using hardware profiles if you would like to experiment with disabling services on a large scale.