How to Fix Windows XP Running Slow and Make Your PC Run Faster Again

If you find Windows XP is running slow one of the biggest problems you will face is trying to find out what is causing it. Some people get so fed up with having to keep calling out a technician they just go and buy a new computer. This may seem drastic but having to pay repair bills every few months can cost more than a new computer and in these difficult financial times you need to save every penny you can.

Here is how you can fix this problem by protecting the files on your computer.

#1 Backup everything on your computer that is important to you. Sometimes the errors or caused by corrupt programs and files and the only solution is to remove them. If you do not have a back up then you will hesitate to reinstall anything and will have to live with your computer getting slower and slower. You can simply copy important files, documents and pictures to a USB drive, CD, or an external hard drive.

#2 If you are writing documents, saving pictures or saving other data do not make the mistake of saving it to the same file name. There is a very good reason for this. The Windows registry will keep creating entries with the same name but different version numbers and if corruption occurs in the registry the first thing to suffer will be these files. You will start to see strange characters appearing in documents and files, images will not open or try to open under a different name and Windows XP will run slow.

#3 If you start noticing the disk activity light flashing away on your computer like there is no tomorrow and your PC is running slow this indicates a lack of disk space and an insufficient swap file size. Fixing this is easy. First of all remove any software you do not need or use to increase disk space then run the disk defragmenter program to organize all your files and programs properly. The next thing to do is to increase the swap file size.

The swap file is used to temporarily act as memory when the computer is very busy and if it is not big enough the hard drive will go crazy trying to compensate for this by swapping data in and out of real memory from the disk drive as fast as it can. Here is how to fix this and stop your Windows XP computer slowing down.

go to my computer on the Windows stat menu then right click on it. The system properties box will open. Click on the advanced tab the go down to where it says performance. click on settings. Then click on the advanced tab. Down the bottom you will see something called virtual memory. This is swap memory. The size of this should be 1.5 times the size of the memory on your computer. If you have 1GB of memory for example this should be 1.5GB. Go to the change button and in there you will see your disk drive and the size. Click on the custom size button and set the minimum and maximum size to 1.5GB and then press the set button.

#4 Look after the Windows registry. People hear this so many times they do not pay any notice. The fact is though if the Windows computer has serious errors or corruption your computer will suffer. Errors do occur and Windows can work around minor ones. But as more occur they can cause your computer to slow down again and this is where people waste a lot of money on technicians bills they can avoid. All you need to do is download a free registry scanner which will find these errors. Usually there are hundreds and if you do not believe it download one and see. Many are minor some are major and some can stop Windows working if left unfixed.

Carrying out these steps can prevent Windows XP from running slow and make it fast and error free without wasting all your money on technicians bills or a new computer.