Want your computer to startup and operate faster?

Chameleon Startup Manager is a Windows startup manager that accelerates Windows startup and ensures smoother running of the operating system. It disables any startup programs and fully controls startup by selecting the programs to be launched, while customizing the startup settings (ie how often and when programs should be launched, etc).

Chameleon Startup Manager automatically monitors and reports back if new programs have been added to the startup list, while a manager provides advanced details on running applications.

• Speed Up Boot Times I

This tweak works by creating a batch file to clear the temp and history folders everytime you shutdown so that your PC doesn't waste time checking these folders the next time it boots. It's quite simple to implement:

When your PC starts it usually looks for any bootable media in any floppy or cd-rom drives you have installed before it gets around to loading the Operating System from the HDD. This can waste valuable time. To fix this we need to make some changes to the Bios.

Note: Once this change has been made, you won't be able to boot from a floppy disc or a CD-rom. If for some strange reason you need to do this in the future, just go back into your bios, repeat the steps above and put your floppy or CD-rom back as the "First Device"

When your computer boots up it usually has to check with the network to see what IP addresses are free and then it grabs one of these. By configuring a manually assigned IP address your boot time will improve. To do this do the following:

Because Windows XP has to be all things to all people it has many services running that take up system resources that you will never need.
Below is a list of services that can be disabled on most machines:

To disable these services:

If you have a lot of folders and subdirectories on your computer, when you access a directory XP wastes a lot of time updating the time stamp showing the last access time for that directory and for ALL sub directories. To stop XP doing this you need to edit the registry. If you are uncomfortable doing this then please do not attempt.

A great new feature in Microsoft Windows XP is the ability to do a boot defragment. This places all boot files next to each other on the disk to allow for faster booting. By default this option in enables but on some builds it is not so below is how to turn it on.

If you have more than 256MB of RAM this tweak will considerably improve your performance. It basically makes sure that your PC uses every last drop of memory (faster than swap file) before it starts using the swap file.

This tweak reduces the time XP waits before automatically closing any running programs when you give it the command to shutdown.