Lesson 2 - Simple (and free) ways how to speed up your computer:

Tip: Disable the XP loading screen

To speed up booting your computer process slightly, disable the Windows XP loading screen. This can be done very easy:
- Open the MSCONFIG utility (Open Start\Run and type msconfig)
- Select the boot.ini tab
- Check the /NOGUIBOOT option. When you boot (start) your PC, you will see a black screen in between POST and the welcome screen from now on.

Tip: Check your hard drives with scandisk

With time, tons of small data problems and physical problems can develop and slow down the performance of your hard drive. While defragmenting the drive can help restore much of the performance you might have lost, there are other issues such as lost clusters which the defragmentation utility cannot fix.
Because of this, it is a good idea to run XP's error checking utility once in a while. This utility scans your disks for errors and optionally attempt to correct them.

- Open My computer
- Right click the hard disk you wanna scan and select Properties from the menu
- Choose the Tools tab and under Error checking click the Check now… button.
- Check both options. You will need to restart the computer to do the full disk check.

Your disk will be fully checked for errors upon reboot, but this can take quite a while.