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Windows XP tune up video number four, now we’re going to get in to the real performance optimization, what we dealt with previously was cleaning the hard drive and ensuring polish structure integrity.
Today, as you notice my screen is a little different from what you’ve seen previously that’s because I wanted to walk you through this step by step to show you exactly how to perform these tasks. While on your desktop simply right-click anywhere in the open area and then we’re going to choose properties and here under the theme setting you see the Windows XP. The Windows XP thing actually uses a lot of resources, memory and processing. So we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to switch that to Windows classic. This will make your Windows desktop with more like the original Windows like Windows 2000 and the older versions.
So I'm going to go ahead and select apply. And now you can notice the desktop differences. Another thing we’re going to take a look at in here is the screen saver tab. Typically screen savers are pretty much a blast from the past. They were first introduced in order to stop screen burning on the old style monitors. That’s where if you left your computer on for too long with the same image and when you actually turn it off you would still slightly see your icons and with the newer style monitors that really no longer occurs so we’re going go under here under screen saver and select none. And then we’re going to select apply.
Go ahead and select okay to close that window. Before our next step I want to show you how to review how much memory your computer has so you may need to write the information down once you do review exactly how much memory you had because we’re going to need that information for a task in just a moment. So if you simply go to your start menu and right click my computer then choose properties and the main page or the general page you’ll see down here at the bottom or tells me what type of CPU I'm running and then it tells me how much RAM I have.
Now this is basically one gig of memory. You could have 256 megabyte of RAM or 512 or 768 or one gig. So now that we have that information go ahead and write that down whatever you see yours listed as and the next step we’re going to go ahead and choose the advanced menu. From here we’re going to ahead and select the settings under the performance options and on the visual effects, Windows XP has a lot of visual effects as you can see the shadow underneath my cursor. It runs other images like that so here we have to set to let Windows choose what’s best for my computer, that’s really not what’s best for your computer when you're considering performance.
So if you’ll simple select the adjust for best performance and then select apply, those are turned off now and as you can see the shading by my cursor is going in all the neat and fancy little tricks of Windows XP were turned off. Now once you’ve completed that step the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to choose the advanced tab under the performance options. And here is what we’re going to need that bit of information that you previously wrote down about how much RAM you have.
So under virtual memory, we’re going to select the change button. So things to know about virtual memory are basically a paging file on your hard drive that is used to write information that is not needed in RAM at the moment. So I have approximately one gig or 2048 megabytes of memory on my computer. Now the file does not need to be larger than that and it’s recommended to go ahead and make your maximum size the same number as your initial size and your initial size needs to be twice the amount of RAM you have. If you have 256 megabytes of RAM then it will need to be 512. If you have 512 it’s going to be a thousand or so.
So I'm going to go ahead and change the maximum size to the same as my initial size. And then I'm going to go ahead and select set. You may be prompted to restart your computer at this point when finishing up this option. If you go ahead and do that that will complete this action and then you can select okay. You must restart your computer before the changes can take effect. So go ahead and restart your computer and we’ll catch you on video five.
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