General PC Maintenance & Troubleshooting

5. Remove Background Bitmaps and Screen Savers

Large background bitmaps (anything over 100KB) will take this amount of memory away from windows and your applications, potentially causing them to run more slowly. Additionally, it take more time for windows to startup. Screen savers which have been badly written (which includes many screen savers downloaded from the internet or received via email) will consume your precious memory and cause applications to run more slowly until the computer is restarted.

> Go to the START button
> Select SETTINGS
> Select CONTROL PANEL
> Select DISPLAY
> On the Background tab, select (None) for the background picture
> On the Screen saver tab, select (None) as the screen saver
> Select the OK Button, to save these settings.

These are just some of the basic things which can be done to speed up a previously faster system.

Other items not covered in this article, such as updating Service Packs, Drivers and tweaking registry settings are not detailed in this article due to the complexity and variable nature of these changes.

Additionally, it is sometimes easier and more cost effective to clean install the machine or upgrade certain components such as memory or the whole computer

Tony Spencer
Senior Network Engineer
neXus network