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Speed Up Windows 98

Sure, most brand-new home PCs now come preloaded with Windows Me. But if you didn't get a new PC for the holidays, there's an even chance you still run good ol' Windows 98.

Breathe easy, though, because you can speed up your copy of Windows 98. We can't promise a return to Windows 95's speed, but these 12 tips will help make Windows 98--and ultimately you--more efficient. First, find out how to clean up the space-hogging, speed-robbing junk on your hard drive. Next, learn how to optimize your PC and cut a few corners for maximum performance. Then, once you've finished tweaking your settings, find out how to check for out-of-date hardware and drivers and make sure your system boots as quickly as possible. Finally, check out our pointers to help you work effectively.

Don't fool yourself; even if you follow all of our tips, you won't turn your Pentium into a Pentium 4. But our tips will help you get the most out of what you already have.

Clear the Clutter
It's true: Cleanliness is next to godliness--at least as far as your hard drive is concerned. There's no better way to speed up your machine than to clean it up, and we'll show you how.

Tune Up Your System
Your father always said that if you change your oil as needed, your car will run forever. Well, the same wisdom works for your PC. These steps, performed regularly, will keep your Windows 98 system running smoothly.

Upgrade and Update
Sometimes, your system just can't keep up with your OS. When that happens, there's only one answer: upgrade. We'll help you root out and annihilate your hardware deficiencies, then give you the scoop on driver updates.

Start Faster
Power on. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boot. It doesn't have to be this way. Follow these three tips and cut minutes off your system's boot time.

Speed Up Yourself Too
It's tempting to blame Microsoft for all your computing woes, but the reality is, we can all train ourselves to work a little faster. These simple shortcuts will have you zipping around your desktop in a jiffy.

Use A Software For It

There are many softwares for speeding up windows98 but the one we know is WINBOOST .

Delete Junk Programs
Unused programs clutter your hard drive, robbing you of valuable space and ultimately slowing down system performance. Hard drive clutter also causes conflicts with the useful apps on your system. Our test machines showed significantly faster performance and increased stability when we simply removed a few unused programs.
To get your hard drive squeaky clean, use an uninstaller application, CleanSweep keeps track of unused files, schedules cleanup jobs, and removes applications more completely than the Windows Add/Remove Programs utility. If you're on a budget and can't afford CleanSweep, try a shareware uninstaller, or keep a close watch on the applications you install, and remove any that cause problems.

Lose the Extra Fonts
If you have more fonts than you really use, you're wasting precious disk space. To find out how many fonts are on your system, open the Fonts Control Panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Fonts). There you'll find a list of all your installed fonts. Double-click a font's name to get copyright info and file size, as well as an example of what the font looks like at sizes up to 72 points. Delete any unnecessary fonts, and you'll free up a bunch of disk space.

Tidy Up the Registry
The Windows Registry is a database of all your system's settings and software. Whenever a Windows 95 or 98 program is installed, removed, or modified, Windows updates the Registry to reflect the change--or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work.

Real life is less tidy. System crashes, buggy uninstall programs, and plain old bad luck can clutter your Registry, leaving it full of improper associations, bogus lists of installed programs, and all sorts of other junk that can slow down and even crash your operating system.

If you really know what you're doing, you can clean the Registry with RegEdit (the Windows Registry editor). For most users, though, we suggest a safer alternative: Microsoft's RegClean. This download hunts down and removes bogus Registry entries automatically. It can also reverse any changes you make and restore your previous Registry if something goes wrong. Most uninstallers, such as CleanSweep, also clean your Registry--and they do a better job than the free RegClean. Make a routine of cleaning the Registry, and Windows 98 will run faster and be more reliable.

Tune Up Your System

Defrag Regularly
Removing data from your system leaves empty spaces on your hard drive. When Windows saves new data, it fills in these cracks, often splitting up files and thus increasing the amount of time it takes to access that file. To help reorganize your hard drive into continuous chunks and consequently speed up system performance, Microsoft includes a defragmenting program in its OSs (and has since DOS 6.0).

The Windows 98 defrag utility is better than its predecessors. It records the way Windows accesses files when you run a program, then reorganizes those files to fit how Windows works. For example, it organizes files sequentially, in the order Windows reads them, and places your most frequently accessed programs on the fastest parts of your disk. The end result? A speed boost for all your programs, and a bigger boost for your favorites.

Get FAT

Compressing your data with the Windows DriveSpace utility is a really bad idea. It does save disk space, but it also slows down system performance. That's because compressing and expanding files hogs resources that could be used for running other programs. Even Microsoft agrees: since the release of Windows 98, the company has suggested converting your disk to FAT32 format instead of using DriveSpace.

Unfortunately, FAT32 format has its share of problems, too. In our tests, FAT32 disks lagged a few percentage points behind disks formatted in the older FAT16 format. Most home users probably won't notice the difference, but if you really need the speediest performance you can get, stick with an uncompressed FAT16 drive and buy an extra hard disk.

Go Easy on Video
If your screen redraws slowly or you experience other video glitches, your video card may be working too hard. Some video cards claim to offer screen resolutions and color depths they can't actually support. If you think your card might be maxed out, try bumping down the color depth or screen resolution a notch in the Display Control Panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Display), or right-click the desktop and choose Properties. Unless you're a graphic designer, you probably won't notice the difference between 32-bit true color and 16-bit high color, anyway.

Upgrade And Update

Upgrade Your Hardware
No matter how much you tune up the engine, you won't turn a Buick into a Ferrari. The same is true with computers: sometimes you just have to take the plunge and buy some new hardware. There's a hardware upgrade for almost every speed problem. Here are a few of the most common problems and solutions

Problem:  System runs slowly, hard drive always spinning. Solution:  Buy more RAM. If your Windows 98 system is running on less than 64MB of RAM, an upgrade will speed things up considerably.

Problem:  Plenty of RAM, but system still slow. Solution:  Upgrade your processor and/or motherboard. RAM is generally the biggest processing bottleneck, but if you're running less than a Pentium-166 MMX, a new processor should give you the horsepower you need for number crunching. If you run processor-intensive applications such as Photoshop, or if you plan on upgrading to Windows NT, look for a Pentium II or its equivalent. And remember: Adding a second processor to your motherboard will speed up only NT. Windows 98 won't even recognize it, so don't bother!

Problem:  Slow game performance. Solution:  Buy a new video card. Today's 3D games demand so much computing power that even the fastest CPU can't handle the job. Instead, a game's speed often depends on the video card, and if yours is short on RAM or runs a 2D-only processor, you're out of luck. You can find plenty of decent 3D accelerator cards for as little as Rs 8000.

Update Your Drivers
Although many Windows 95 drivers will run under Windows 98, most of them work less efficiently with the newer OS--and some don't work at all. To ensure the best performance of your hardware, you need the latest driver. And that may not be the one that was with your original Windows 98 CD-ROM. Why? Because several vendors didn't create Windows 98 drivers in time for them to ship with the OS. Thus, Microsoft included interim drivers whose performance was less than ideal.

The good news? By now most vendors have completed their Windows 98 drivers. The best way to get the latest drivers is to hit the vendor sites and look for upgrades. If you're as lazy as we are, have an online software updater such as CyberMedia's OilChange do the searching for you.

Start Faster

Don't Autostart Anything
Nothing's slower than having to wait for your computer to launch a bunch of programs each times it starts up. To stop a program from launching at start-up, just open C:WindowsStart MenuProgramsStartUp in Windows Explorer and delete that program's shortcut.

Windows 98's System Information tool (Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Information) gives you an even more detailed list of autostarting programs. Just expand the Software Environment menu and choose Startup Programs. This will show you any programs that are automatically launched by the Registry. To keep these programs from autostarting, consult each application's help file .

Stop the Floppy Scan
When Windows 98 boots up, it wastes time scanning for new floppy drives. You can reclaim these lost seconds via the System Control Panel applet (Start/Settings/Control Panel/System, or right-click My Computer and choose Properties). Select the Performance tab; click the File System button; select the Floppy Disk tab; and uncheck the option "Search for new floppy disk drives every time your computer starts.

Speed Up Reboots
If you think Windows 98 takes too long to boot, you can remove the built-in two-second delay in the OS's start-up sequence. Here's what you need to do:

•	Under the Start button, select Find/Files or Folders.
•	Enter msdos.sys in the Named box and C: in the Look In box. Then click Find Now.
•	When the file appears, right-click it and select Properties from the pop-up menu.
•	Click to remove the check marks from the Read-Only and Hidden attributes, then click OK.
•	Right-click msdos.sys, select Open With from the pop-up menu, enter Notepad as the opening program, and then click OK.
•	Under Options, enter BootDelay=0 or BootDelay=1 on its own line. (This represents respective delays of zero seconds and one second, both of which are faster than the default).
•	Close Notepad and save your changes on the way out.
•	Return msdos.sys to its hidden, read-only state. (Right-click it, select Properties from the pop-up menu, and check the Read-Only and Hidden check boxes. Then click OK.)
•	Quit and restart Windows.

Warning: Any time you make changes to your SYS files, it's a good idea to back up your important files and have your original Windows disk on hand in case you need to reinstall.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts
These tips won't speed up Windows 98, but they will make the person using it more efficient. Even the most mouse-happy user can save time with a few simple keyboard shortcuts. Here are some of our favorites:

If you have a Windows keyboard (with a Windows logo on the key between Ctrl and Alt), here are a few more:

 

Shift-Windows key-M:  Reopen minimized windows Windows key-F:  Launch the Find menu Windows key-M:  Minimize all open windows Windows key:  Bring up the Start menu

You can also create your own keyboard shortcuts to launch frequently accessed applications or files. Just create a shortcut to a file, then right-click and choose Properties. Enter a key combination (such as Ctrl-Alt-X) in the Shortcut key field, click OK, then launch the program at any time with just the keyboard.

Control Panel Shortcuts
Your Control Panel makes easy work of configuring Windows 98, but if clicking through Start/Settings/Control Panel gets on your nerves, here's a quick fix: Open the Control Panel folder, select the icons of your frequently used applets (hold down Ctrl while you click for multiple selections), then drag them onto your Start button. The Start menu will open, allowing you to place your new Control Panel shortcuts wherever you want.

We suggest leaving them in the root of the Start menu and renaming them something unique (go to C:\Windows\Start Menu in the Windows Explorer, right-click the icon, and choose Rename). That way, you can access them with just a click of the Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc if you don't have a Windows key) and the first letter or number of the shortcut's name.

Use A Software For It

WinBoost

This software is used for Windows Tweeks and it is very good software. You can speed up your system as well as you can can the names of all programs including Internnet Explorer and also can rename START button.You can download this software from www.winboost.com.