Ok, I REALLY suck at making Walkthroughs, so bare with me here. I have heard from a lot of bros that their computers have problems with running things and things lag like hell, I'm atm, using a computer with a celeron 2.8ghz With a cache of 128kb. An integrated video card with 96mb, and a Hard drive that can only store 80gb of data running winXp

Now, before i start, this guide is built on everything Ihave done throughout my years of working with computers, why i know it works, why you should do it, and why you might not.

Index:
BLUE = New topic area
Red = Helpful hints
Note = yellow

Basic services and Startup:

So the first thing we will be editing is what slows down you computer as it start up, and that would be the startup programs, Mind you, Ill be writing this guide as though your a complete idiot in the ways of defining anything the computer may through at you, may it be jumbled puzzle of letters the company uses to refer to its file or the simple ending of a file with Exe.

Steps:

1) click your start menu
2) Click on Run
3) Click in the box and type msconfig
4) Press enter on the keyboard
5) After a window pops up look up at the tabs, click on services
6) Click the little box in the bottom that says, Hide all Microsoft services, we want a tick in that box.
7) Skim through these services, do you need them? Do you know what they are? Anything you know and you can start on your own untick in its box, these slow down the system.
8} Click on the next tab called Startup, Dont worry, i know it looks scary as hell if your clueless as to what this is. These my friend are all the things that start while your computer is starting up, half of them you see in your taskbar on the right, the other half are background applications. *Fun Fact: Viruses love entering their own startup code here, so by memorizing or writing down all the startup things you know are needed and yours you can safely assume that its safe to untick it, if it isnt a virus and its just one of your lately installed programs you can go back and untick it, or be wise and just start the program whenever you really need it.*

*Fun Fact: Their is a FREE tool from IObit Its called Advanced system care, it is very computer friendly and it does roughly everything ive said so far, and everything i will say, for those of you who want to learn how to do this, continue on, for those of you too lazy here is a link to the program.*

Your Central Processing Unit and you:

Now, i know some of you are thinking, "Fuufufuf, 2.8ghz processor nub that awesome." Here is the one reason your right.... And the avalanche of why you are wrong. First is first, A Your Central Processing Unit, Aka Your Cpu, has two things you need to know about it, what they govern and which is better.

For starters, The 2.8ghz you see right there... Thats the "clock rate or clock speed" This is how fast a program can run, or in other words be processed. Now hold on, this is only half the story, but most sales men will try and con you into getting a highly priced processor that actually lacks that kick in it. The other thing you need to know is the cache, each processor has a cache, its like a ram chip built into the processor, it works faster, the information doesnt need to be sent to the ram and it governs over most important data that needs to be done before the shit thats stored on the ram, In other words, your ram is the old man in the wheelchair and your cache is the 8yo who just had too much sugar.

So for example, My processor, the celeron 2.8ghz and 128 L1 cache, sucks, Why? The limiting factor, the cache. Although i can run normal apps just as fast as any other persons laptop, i cant run memory intensive apps, cause then it would get laggy and slow.

Anyway, your processor dedicates both cache and its effort into running dozens of background applications, with these applications off... I hope you guessed this, YOUR COMPUTERS WILL RUN FASTER.

So, what can you do to make your computer stress less on your cpu? Well, we covered part of that in the last section, now to know whats killing your processor, i want you to do the following.

1) right click your task bar
2) Click on task manager "Note: If its not their Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete"
3) Click the processes tab
4) click on the tab called CPU untill the apps are sorted in descending order of CPU usage. "Note: In general there will always be a task called system idle process or standby, or idle, although you cant mess with those in general stay away from them in case in your system they are for some reason unlocked."
5) Ignore everything under the username of System
6) everything listed under your username is most probably unneeded and if you do need it you can start it again from wherever you have it installed, anything under local service i usually kill, and Network services are ALWAYS ignored, unless you want to be internet sober untill someone computer literate reopens that service for you on the computer.
7) If you click on memory usuage while you have nothing running besides taskmanager and a browser, almost all services cost you less than 5k-19k each, together this is a lot, and if you have anything running above 100k that you dont know of, take its name, do a google search, find out if its a program you use.
8} If the program you searched is something you use and your currently working with, leave it alone, if it isnt, right click and click end task.


"Hint: Script kiddies who infect you computer with a hidden keylogger usually never think about hiding the process from task manager, if you think you have a keylogger, check task manager for unusual things, search them, if its a keylogger, search for where its installed, research how it works, make fake send fake info through the keylogger telling the spy that you've caught onto his game, usually the email\ftp server\ip of the spy is listed somewhere within the keyloggers settings, finding it goes from easy to hard depending on the variety of the keylogger. Send him a message with his info that you gathered, you can ether report him to whoever you want and maybe if your sadistic, scare him into thinking you'll sue for invasion of privacy or some shit like that."

*To be Continued*

General Harddisk health:

Your hard disk is where everything is stored, and i mean EVERYTHING, unlike the processor, which is the thinking part of the brain, this is the storage are for your brain.Now, let me take you a trip down memory lane, you wake up in the morning, and you go to your exam having studied all night, your at the table then. BAAM! you have no idea how to solve a simultaneous equation, you've done them your entire life, but after soaking up so much new information the way to deal with it is lost in the sea of other information, and not to mention all those meme's you were reading at midnight. THAT is how a computer feels after you store too much information on it and install too much shit.So you ask, "What can i do?" well first thing is first, take a look at your desktop.... Honestly now, can you see your desktop image? or is more than half of it covered in icons?

So the first thing we want to do, is remove all the information the computer doesnt need, in this case, every single program you dont use.

1) click start
2) click control panel
3) double click Add\remove programs
4) look through this entire list, anything you dont use uninstall immediately, if you havent used it once in the last month toss it out. The dog is dead, and you cant keep it.
5) dont restart after each time you uninstall something, that would be stupid.

Now we want to rearrange ALLLL the information the computer has learned throughout its years of your torture, and data cramming. This is the least user intensive thing in this entire thread i believe. But it takes the most time, esp for those with huge harddrives.

1) Click start
2) hit all programs or search
3) look for accessories. "If searching search for disk defragmenter"
4) hover over it, the hover over system tools
5) click disk defragmenter
6) click on drive C
7) click defragment
8} repeat for other disk drives

Now, i know most of you when you come to install something, you dont read the eula, you dont check where its installing, and you dont give a rats ass about its size. For the last 3, your idiots for doing that. First, the eula makes sure you understand the nature of the software and your rights, by not reading them, you give up those rights. Second, Installation, ill be talking about that in the next section. Third, The size. If you install a lot of really big things in just one drive you increase the chances of the disk becoming fragmented.


Proper Harddisk partitioning:

Your hard disk should always be partitioned into a minimum of 2 partitions, partition C and D. In partition C you should never install anything, only Windows goes on that partition, and partition D should have everything that you want on your computer. the reason is so that your computer doesnt have any problems locating the data it needs to run, then it can worry about your games and apps in another place, thus keeping disk C at a minimal fragmentation level.

If you'd like, like me, partition it into more than 3, One for windows, from 30-40gb, One for D where all your programs that you want to keep will be, And E where you keep temporary things that your going to get rid of after you've used them.


*To be continued im getting bored*

Hope this helps for now, next time ill tell y'all about setting up your bios and a couple of more tiny things i do for a faster pc.

*Note: This is all based on my personal experience with WinXp, i am providing this as is, as a help guide, you should always have a professional next to you incase you manage to screw something up, oh and most importantly, anyone have anything to add or ask feel free. Lastly, im not responsible for any tinkering you may do with what you dont know.*

BIOS and CMOS (No not biographies):

Ok, to begin with you need to understand some basic things, like for example that BIOS, stands for Basic Input and Output System, And CMOS stands for Complementary Metal Oxide Semi-conductor, Now that we are past knowing the names of out soon to be best friend lets get down to business.


What could the BIOS or CMOS settings do for you, you might ask.... well, for example take this into consideration. You've got a low budget lappy, it sucks ass and its got an integrated video card in it, youve got a base of only 128mb and your craving for just 256mb of power to be able to run another your game with a couple of more FPS (Frames per second, most livestreamers should know this)


Well, put simply your integrated graphics card uses your onboard ram to run, in the bios you can tell it to use MORE ram, thus making things work better if you have a surplus of ram, which needs to be enough to run the normal processes and enough for your bios to allow you to "steal" from the system.


Ok, so lets get this started, each pc is different, and each systems bios is different, from my experience ive only came across 3 different brands of bios American megatrends (My bios), Award Software (My uncles old computers bios) and Phoenix technologies, Im not sure if these are linked to each other in any way, but they all have seemingly different layouts, ill be discussing my American megatrend's settings which should mostly mirror the others the difference may only be slight as in wording or placement of your settings.


Ok, you'll need to write this down, cause your pc needs to be restarted so you can change these settings.


1) restart your pc, while starting up, press f10 to enter your pc's bios. "Note: It may be f8 as on my gramp's lappy or delete as on my uncles old comp"


*Going to restart my pc and write down the settings, cant store this anywhere so ill post for now*

2) After your computer enters bios move down to Advanced CMOS settings and hit enter

3) Move down to something labeled Integrated memory or Shared memory or anything of the like, usually it will be the only thing with a settings that can be changed in megabytes, the rest would have no mention of megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB).

4) go back one menu

5) Move down to saves settings and exit

6) when your pc restarts, if your pc is using intel graphics cards, Use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F12 to open the intel graphics monitor and check out if your graphics is at what you set it at. If not, you probably forgot to save your settings while exiting the advanced CMOS settings or you pressed the Esc key to go back.

Reducing lag in firefox in Youtube videos, and flash games:

I know some people have had this problem, with the switch from IE for some was a blessing after a while you get used to FF, then the youtube lag gets on your nerves and the microlag makes you feel like your computer is beginning to reach its replacement time. Well, thats due to a certain pesky service firefox offers, and that would be the restore session feature.

Firefox is set to save your session ever 30 seconds or so, and each time it does that it causes a some lag which may be prolonged or a simple twitch for others, you can set firefox to save at intervals which are shorter with an easy method.

Steps:
1) Click on your address bar. (The thing that contains the URL of where your at almost always starting with http, or https)
2) Type "About:Config" Without the " on both sides
3) Type "session" in the bar labelled filter on top of the list, also without the "s.
4) Look for one named browser.sessionstore.interval
5) Right click this and left click Modify
6) Set it something high for longer intervals for session saving to reduce lag. "Hint: If your constantly working on important stuff using firefox and you constantly close the browser due to clumsiness its best not to set this too high, you want a good balance between safeness and laglessness."


Mini; Firefox cache and you:

This wont really do wonders for you, and it will cause general havoc for those of you that dont purge your temp internet files, but for those of you who want a larger FF cache for those games that take too long to load, heres what to do.


1) Click on your address bar. (The thing that contains the URL of where your at almost always starting with http, or https)
2) Type "About:Config" Without the " on both sides
3) Type "cache" in the bar labelled filter on top of the list, also without the "s.
4) there are going to be a lot, so keep your eye out for one named browser.cache.disk.capacity it should be third one down from the top of the list
5) Increase it untill you see fit, i have mine set at 1048576, but that's just personal preference really.


*To be continued when i remember something else important that i have a feeling im forgetting XD*

Fresh install? Or just cleaning up the cobwebs?

well, my dreams are always fucked up and so is the one that made me realize that not everyone here may be working using a fresh install, or in fact have any clue as to which is better, so here is my take on this. First, do you have anything on the computer you really want to keep, programs, files, those pictures you have locked in a hidden folder of Xebaz eating someone elses cake so you can blackmail him.... Any who, ether you have stuff you want to keep or not. Ill walk you down both paths for a while, and let you decide which is the one you want to follow


Lets say, you just got a badass new computer, 2 i7 processors, dual gtx670's bridged for the 3d support and livestreaming, a large ass 5tb harddrive and 4 lovely flat screen tv's stretched across what used to be the wall to your bedroom, you feel badass, you probably are.... at that moment. So anyway, your playing, chatting, working, tinkering. Year goes bye and your computer is lagging worse than your old computer that its fan would sound like a old guy who forgot to take his breathing meds. You think, "Hey, i musta just overworked it, lets leave it alone for a bit and chill." you tell yourself youll ice and hour or 2 doing something else, but in less than half an hour and your back, lag is still there, but slightly unnoticeable. but after your just settling in, BAM! Its back to give you a wake up bitchslap in the face. If your one of the tech savvy sort, and had already optimized your computer like earlier, then you would have just stopped after your computer showed the first signs of acting like your old one. Cause sir. Your computer probably has a virus, and no, not the common cold, well, hell thats how the computer feels, each time it lags, is like when you sneeze, each time it locks up is like when your tired, each time it shuts down is like when your too tired to get out of the bed. Only this time, ether you give the puppy its meds, or the puppy will die.

So you've got 2 options at this point fresh install or keep all your shit, work hard for 2-3 days to undo the fucking up you did over the last year or so. Personally, i install everything i keep on a file server, or a second partition, that way if i need to reformat an area, i know which is infected, and im sure its cut off from the rest of the system. First is first. Your computer boots slowly, remove everything in your startup(part 1), Then defragment your drive(part 2), third get some proper antivirus software. Below is a list of the do and don'ts of antivirus and firewalls.

DO: Avast, comodo firewall and antivirus, Nod32 (enterprise version only if you can afford it), Kaspersky

DONTS: Windows firewall, homebrew firewalls, custom setups, McAfee (they went bad after a while by becoming lazy asshats)

NEVER FUCKING DO: Norton antivirus (Its like getting a shot filled with rabies, injecting yourself with it and saying your now immune from rabies) Avira antivirus (Just as bad as norton)


After you have the right equipment, and have done the last 3 steps, run your antivirus and flush all the script kiddie viruses from your computer, with those gone your computer should run noticeably better. If you want a quick shortcut to just remove most of the viruses, just get Malewarebytes , run it once and remove the shit it finds, it needs someone who is tech savvy to understand the results, but anything thats infected should be highlighted in red, sometimes there are false positives, so anything your unsure about dont do.

Have to agree with brootal on this one, i myself am not a fan for 64 bit systems, they are cumbersome in some areas. Anyway, chrome is indeed faster, but not by much from my testing, and FF is much more easier when it comes to modding, hacking and online website development, so it won its place on my cybershelf. Still, i guess its a matter of personal opinion, Application vs Speed and all.