If your Windows XP system is running slowing and you need to improve the performance of your Windows XP system, one of the major things for you to do is to turn off unnecessary services on your Windows XP system.

Following are the common services we’ll turn off if you are running in a typical network environment. Check them and you’ll be surprised by what is running without your knowledge.

Service Glossary For Windows XP

IIS – Microsoft’s Internet Information Services provide the capabilities of a Webserver for your computer.

NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing — NetMeeting is primarily a VoIP and videoconferencing client for Microsoft Windows, but this service in particular is necessary to remote desktop access.

Remote Desktop Help Session Manager – This service is used by the Remote Assistance feature that you can use to allow others remote access to the system to help you troubleshoot problems.

Remote Registry – The capabilities provided by the Remote Registry service are frightening to consider from a security perspective. They allow remote users (in theory, only under controlled circumstances) to edit the Windows Registry.

Routing and Remote Access – This service bundles a number of capabilities together, capabilities that most system administrators would probably agree should be provided separately. It is rare that any of them should be necessary for a typical desktop system such as Microsoft Windows XP, however, so they can all conveniently be turned off as a single service. Routing and Remote Access provides the ability to use the system as a router and NAT device, as a dialup access gateway, and a VPN server.

Simple File Sharing – When a computer is not a part of a Microsoft Windows Domain, it is assumed by the default settings that any and all filesystem shares are meant to be universally accessible. In the real world, however, we should only want to provide shares to very specific, authorized users. As such, Simple File Sharing, which only provides blanket access to shares without exceptions, is not what we want to use for sharing filesystem resources. It is active by default on both MS Windows XP Professional and MS Windows XP Home editions. Unfortunately, this cannot be disabled on MS Windows XP Home. On MS Windows XP Professional, however, you can disable it by opening My Computer -> Tools -> Folder Options, clicking the View tab, and unchecking the Use simple file sharing (Recommended) checkbox in the Advanced settings: pane.

SSDP Discovery Service – This service is used to discover UPnP devices on your network, and is required for the Universal Plug and Play Device Host service (see below) to operate.

Telnet – The Telnet service is a very old mechanism for providing remote access to a computer, most commonly known from its use in the bad ol’ days of security for remote command shell access on Unix servers. These days, using Telnet to remotely manage a Unix system may be grounds for firing, where an encrypted protocol such as SSH should be used instead.

Universal Plug and Play Device Host – Once you have your “Plug and Play” devices installed on your system, it is often the case that you will not need this service again.

Windows Messenger Service – Listed in the Services window under the name Messenger, the Windows Messenger Service provides “net send” and “Alerter” functionality. It is unrelated to the Windows Messenger instant messaging client, and is not necessary to use the Windows Messenger IM network.
On your system, these services may not all be turned on, or even installed. Whether a given service is installed and running may depend on whether you installed the system yourself, whether you are using XP Home or XP Professional, and from which vendor you got your computer if MS Windows XP was installed by a vendor.

With the exception of Simple File Sharing, all of the above listed services can be disabled from the same place.

How To Turn Them Off?

To turn off any services, just do the following:-

• Click on the Start button, then navigate to Settings -> Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, and from there open the Services window.
• To disable any service in the list, double-click on its entry in that window and change the Startup type: setting.
• In general, you should change services you are turning off for security purposes to a “Disabled” state.
• When in doubt about whether a given service is necessary for other services, check the Dependencies tab in the service’s settings dialog.

Windows Services Running On My System

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list of everything running on your computer that you may want to turn off. It is merely a list of ten items that you most likely do not need to have running, and constitute a security vulnerability if left running. Most users will never have need of any of the services in this list, once the computer is up and running. Other services may be disabled without ill effect as well, though you should research each item in the complete services list before you disable it to ensure that you actually do not need it running. Some of them are quite critical to the normal operation of your system, such as the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service.

Every running — but unused — service on your machine is an unnecessary security vulnerability. If a service is not important at all for authorized users and basic system functionality, turn it off.

3D Pinball for Windows has nine rank levels, ranging from Cadet to Fleet Admiral. Complete each mission and advance to the next rank, but you go back to Cadet at the beginning of each game. Here are a few secret codes to get more enjoyment out of 3D Pinball. Note that the 3D Pinball window must be active for these codes to work.

• Regain your old rank from a previous game by starting a new game and immediately typing rmax. Each time you type this secret command, you’ll advance one rank level.
• Get an extra ball while the Awaiting Deployment message displays by typing 1max.
• Activate the Gravity Well by starting a new game and immediately typing gmax.
• Get an unlimited number of balls and essentially play for as long as you like by starting a new game and immediately typing bmax. Each time you lose a ball, a new one will appear. (While playing with an unlimited number of balls, none of the other tricks will work.)
• Control the ball with your mouse by starting a new game and immediately typing hidden test. When you do, you can click the ball with your left mouse button and essentially drag it anywhere you want and rack up an unbelievable number of points.

Keep in mind that there isn’t a text box into which you enter these secret codes — you simply type them.

Note: This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.

If you are reading this article, I suppose you are still using Windows XP at this very moment. I hope you know that Windows 7 is already out and if you have heard of anything bad about Microsoft Windows Vista, fred not, cause Windows 7 is seriously a lot better than Windows Vista.

For us, we still have customers using Windows XP and their reasons are:-

• “why spend extra when everything is working fine?”
• “it’s working with my current hardware and software, so no reason to  introduce unforeseeable problems into our environment”
• “we are comfortable with Windows XP so no point wasting time to learn anything new”

As you can see, the bottomline is the inertia to upgrade and the mentality of “don’t fix when ain’t broken”.

If Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

There are actually tonnes of reasons for you to upgrade to Windows 7, which we’ll probably list in another article, but for now, if the users are  still comfortable with Windows XP and don’t intend to upgrade any time sooner, the only thing we can help is to improve the performance of Windows XP so that it can run as good as new (new as in the time when they bought their system then…)

So, for those who are still using Windows XP, you can do the following to  enhance your Windows XP eXPerience:-

1. Defragment your hard disks
   • Even if you have a fresh installation of XP, you should regularly defragment all your system’s physical hard disks.
   • To run the system defragmenter, use the defrag command or run dfrg.msc.
   • I recommend doing so at least once a month, however, do note that you should not be running any other program, including your screen saver, when you are  running the defragmentation program.
2. Periodically clear the Prefetch folder
   • Found at %Windows%\prefetch, the prefetch folder contains pointers that help the system load programs that you’ve recently run. Over time, the accumulation of little-used entries can degrade system performance.
   • Empty this folder about once a month; Do note that cleaning it out much more often will degrade performance.
3. Disable unneeded services
   • By default, XP installs services that many users don’t need. Disabling unnecessary services makes the resources that they used available to other applications.
   • You can use the Msconfig utility’s Services tab to disable services.
4. Get rid of unneeded Startup programs
   • Programs that automatically install icons in the system tray and Startup folder are those you need to look out for. Although they usually add no functionality, they do eat away at system resources.
   • To get rid of these parasites, run Msconfig, click the Startup tab, and clear the check box for each program you want to disable.
5. Adjust the Visual Effects setting
   • For systems that don’t have a lot of CPU power (less than 800MHz), you can boost screen performance by changing the Visual Effects settings.
   • Open the Control Panel System applet, click the Advanced tab, click the Settings button in the Performance area, then select the “Adjust for best performance” option.
6. Preset the paging file size
   • When your system needs more memory than it has, Windows expands the paging file and all other system functions stop until the expansion is complete.
   • Setting the maximum paging file size to twice the amount of physical RAM typically lets you avoid that performance hit.
   • Open the System applet, select the Advanced tab, and click the Settings button under Performance. In the Performance Options window, select the Advanced tab, then click Change under “Virtual memory”. Enter the desired maximum paging file size in the “Maximum size” field.
7. Get a second hard disk
   • With today’s high performance systems, the performance bottleneck is almost always the I/O subsystem. Spreading I/O over multiple hard disks relieves that choke point.
   • Put your OS on one drive and your applications on the other.
   • Adding a drive also helps you keep the recommended 20 percent free space on your system drive.
8. Use the DMA setting for all your hard disks
   • When you add a second hard disk, XP often automatically sets it to the slowest Programmed I/O (PIO) mode. Most of today’s drives are capable of using the far more efficient direct memory access (DMA) setting.
   • To change the drive settings, open the System applet, click the Hardware tab, then click Device Manager. Expand “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers” and open the properties of the Primary IDE Channel. Select the Advanced Settings tab, and select “DMA if available” from the Transfer Mode drop-down list under both Device 0 and Device 1.
9. Paging File Location
   • If you use a two-drive system, you can enhance performance by moving the paging file I/O to a different disk spindle than the one the OS uses.
   • To do so, open the System applet, select the Advanced tab, and click the Settings button under Performance.
   • Select the Advanced tab in the new window, click Change under “Virtual memory,” and select your system’s second drive from the Drive list.
10. Get more RAM
    • Getting an adequate amount of RAM is the most effective way to improve XP’s performance. If you don’t have enough RAM, no amount of tweaking will make your system run faster.
    • Every XP system should have a minimum of 512MB of RAM. For power users, 2048MB is even better.

So, this sums up what you need to do to improve the performance of your Windows XP system. If you have any other tips, do feel free to comment below.

For those who’ve owned a laptop before, they’ll know that over-charging their laptop batteries will render them useless after a year or two, so they would cleverly remove their batteries when they are working at home or in the office. However, after about 18 months later, they still complain to me that their batteries never last at all.

Well, first thing first. Even when you are not using the laptop batteries and just left it sitting somewhere collecting dust, the batteries are still discharging itself and the worst thing is if you do not use the batteries, they tend to fail even faster!! That means, you’ve paid for a battery during the time you buy the laptop, but the battery just gone bad as you never use it! A big irony, I know, but did you know that?

There are many other users who will cleverly share the tips of doing the following:-

1. Dim the laptop screen
2. Minimize background processes
3. Don’t use the CD/DVD drive.
4. Disable the wireless antenna when not in use.

But there’s still a lot you may not know about battery technology and the things that both help and hinder your laptop’s juicebox.

You can fiddle with background processes and other software settings all you want, but your hardware is the biggest factor in battery life. In fact, software such as power-management utilities can help minimize the impact internal components have on battery longevity. Here are a few more ways to optimize hardware for maximum battery output :-

• Turn off ports.
  • Disabling unused ports and components, such as VGA, Ethernet, PCMCIA, USB, and yes, your wireless, too. You can do this through the Device Manager or by configuring a separate hardware profile (see next step).
• Create Power-Saving Hardware Profiles.
  • Configure your laptop for the various scenarios in which you use it (on a plane, at the coffee shop, at the office, and so on). You can do this through the Hardware Profiles menu by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Preferences or by using a freeware utility such as SparkleXP (for Windows XP users).
• Configure the display to turn off when not in use.
  • This is different from just using a screensaver, because in many cases a screensaver still requires the display’s backlight to be on. You can set the interval to turn the display off in Windows’ Power Options—found in the Control Panel.

Extending the Overall Life

The easiest way to give your battery an early death is to damage it. And the two most common causes of damage are from overheating and overloading. Here’s how you prevent overheating:

• Use a cooling pad when using a notebook computer on your lap.
• Avoid propping your laptop on a pillow, blanket, or other soft surface that can heat up.
• Clean your desk. It sounds strange, but if you have a dusty, dirty desk, that dust will get into the vents and clog the cooling fan. Once the dust is inside your laptop, it is much harder to remove. You can try blasting it out with canned air, but you run the risk of damaging internal components. You can also remove the vent and clean out the grit, but remember that taking apart your laptop can void the warranty. So clean your desk at least once a week, if not daily.
• Never store your laptop in a place where the air temperature exceeds 28 degrees Celsius (80 degree Fahrenheit), such as a hot car or an outdoor patio.
• Consider taking your battery out when using your laptop plugged into AC power. Just make sure to keep the contacts clean. If you need to clean them, use rubbing alcohol. Just make sure you use the batteries occasionally in case it’ll go bad even faster.
• For lithium ion batteries, you do not need to discharge them fully and recharge constantly. Since they don’t have the same “memory” as older nickel-metal hydride batteries, it is actually better to discharge a lithium ion only partially before recharging. You need to do a full discharge only about every 30 charges.

Overloading a battery occurs when you use an AC adapter that has a higher wattage than that specified on the laptop (and battery), or if the circuitry of the laptop consistently overcharges the battery. If you’re using a replacement or spare adapter, make sure the wattage matches your laptop’s within the specified voltage range. In the worst-case scenario, overloading can also damage your motherboard.

Picking a Laptop for Maximum Battery Life

If you’re in the market for a new laptop, there are features and components you should consider to get the most mileage from the system’s battery:-

• An ultra-low-voltage processor, such as the Intel Penryn or one from VIA’s line of ULV processors.
• A solid-state storage drive, which requires less power and, since there are no spinning parts, will suffer less wear and tear than a traditional hard drive.
• An LED display. Although pricey, LEDs use much less power than LCD.
• A smaller screen. A smaller screen means a smaller backlight, which will also save on battery drain.
• Don’t skimp on your battery. If you choose the lowest-cost battery you’ll probably get a battery that degrades quickly, and you’ll end up buying a replacement too soon anyway. So spend the money now to save expense and frustration down the road.
• Don’t buy an expired battery. A good indicator of a battery’s performance is how far into its product life it is, whether it’s used or new. If possible, look at the bottom of the battery and find the manufacture date.

You try and try again, and still nothing happened.

Then you remembered someone ever tell you to go and clear the print queue and even promising you that after clearing it your printer will be able to print again.

You double-click on your printer icon and wow, there are lots of print jobs there and seems that all those tries you did before were all stucked in the print queue. You delete the first job and it just shows you “…. Deleting print job ….” but yet nothing happened then.

What to do??

If you are like everyone and met with this problem, simple, just follow the following steps will do:-

• Click the Start button, select Run and type in CMD
• press OK (a black command prompt box will open”
• type “net stop spooler” (without the quotes) and press Enter
• type “del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd” (without the quotes) and press Enter
• type “del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl” (without the quotes) and press Enter
• type “net start spooler” (without the quotes) and press Enter

Go and check your print queue now, it should be empty and you can start your printing again. Happy printing
This tip is applicable for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Using Command Prompt To Clear A Hung Print Job

I told him why not just remove those programs he’s not using and that will make his system perform better too. And of course, he says it’s impossible because he uses every one of the program on his system. Hmmm….O….kay.

So, I created a shortcut on his desktop and by double-clicking it, the system shuts down immediately.

This is what I do:-

1. Right-click the desktop to bring up a context window.
2. Select New, then Create Shortcut.
3. In the Command Line space, type the following path:
   • %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -s -f -t 00
     • -s is for shutdown. You can use -r for reboot
     • -f is to force running applications to close without warning and
     • -t xx is to set the timeout for shutdown to xx seconds (00 means immediately)
4. Click on Next, then rename the Icon Shutdown. Click on Finish and the new icon will be on your Desktop.

To shut down the system, just double-click on your new icon and the computer will go directly to shutdown.

How To Create A Shortcut To Shutdown My Windows XP