26. Set priority for important programs

If you customarily use one program a majority of the time you can 'focus' your system on that one particular application by increasing its priority. Priority is the measure that Windows uses to determine the share of processor time that each application receives. By default, most applications are set to the 'normal' priority level, so by changing your favourite app to a higher level, you can boost its performance, especially when you are using other applications at the same time.

To set priority load the program you wish to change the priority for.

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager.

Select the applications tab and highlight your program.

Right click the program and select 'go to process.'

Now right click on the highlighted process and choose 'set priority.'

The higher you set the priority above normal, the more CPU time the program will steal from other applications when you are multitasking.

27. Check your hard drives with scandisk

With time and heavy use, a myriad of data problems and physical problems can develop and mar the performance of your hard drive, not to mention cost you precious space. While defragmenting the drive can help restore much of the performance you might have lost, there are other issues such as lost clusters and bad sectors which the defragmentation utility cannot touch.

Because of this, it is a good idea to run XP's built in error checking utility on your drives once in a while. This utility will scan your disks for errors and optionally attempt to correct them.

Open 'my computer.'

Right click the hard disk you wish to check and select 'properties.'

Choose the 'tools' tab and under 'error checking' select 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 be aware that this can take quite a while.

28. Force XP to unload DLL files after closing a program

Dynamic Link Libraries, or DLLs, are files containing data or functions that Windows programs can call when needed by linking to them. Every piece of windows software will include instructions to the operating system as to which DLLs it will need to access, and XP will cache these particular files in memory for faster access.

The trouble is, Windows XP keeps these DLLs cached after the relevant program has closed, wasting memory space. While DLLs are generally tiny, enough of them can make a dent, so it's worthwhile to implement this registry tweak, which will force Windows XP to unload DLLs used by a specific program when that program halts.

To do this, first run REGEDIT.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer.

reate a new key named 'AlwaysUnloadDLL' and set the default value to equal '1.'