There are many ways to improve the performance of your PC, and today’s article will walk you through disabling visual effects and adjusting CPU scheduling options. These are fairly simple settings that are easier to tweak, but they do not significantly improve performance. This means that this tip will minimize the performance of your computer on most computers. It is suitable for those who have old video cards or a video card with very little memory in their system.
First, the process for disabling visual effects in Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8 is very similar. Second, everything will look like Windows 2000 again. If you don’t like this look, don’t worry about changing the settings. All fancy buttons, sliding menus, shadows, glossy icons, and more will disappear when you turn off the visuals. So, if you really want to speed things up a bit, here’s how to do it.
Right click on “My Computer” and select “Properties.” You will be taken to the System Properties dialog box. You can also go to Control Panel and click “System”. On Windows 7/8, you need to first click Advanced System Settings in the left menu. Go ahead and go to the Advanced tab as shown below:
Then click the Settings button under the Performance heading. This will take you to the Performance Options dialog box:
The default setting in Windows is “Let Windows choose what works best for my computerâ€, and if your computer is too slow, Windows should automatically select “Adjust for best performance†but if you are not using eMachine, Windows will by no means choose this option! Anyway, as you can see from the list, you can also manually uncheck the items one by one, which allows you to keep some of your favorite effects, but not all.
Honestly, if you only love those pretty buttons and glossy windows, but aren’t interested in disappearing menus or sliding combo boxes, then uncheck all but the very last one: use skin styles for windows and buttons. This way, you will still look new, but get rid of the effects that require intensive use of the video card. This will probably work for anyone with an integrated graphics card rather than a dedicated one.
So that’s all about the visuals, you can’t customize there anymore. If you click on the Advanced tab, you will see a few more options in the Processor Scheduling section that you just need to check correctly.
You want to select “Programs” for “Customize for Best Performance”. Unless you are running your computer as a web server, ftp server, game server, or any other server outside of your machine, you should always choose Programs. This ensures that programs receive higher priority for processor and RAM than Windows services.
–