Using MSCONFIG to Help Speed Up Your Computer

Sometimes I find myself wanting to kick and scream at my computer because it is running so slow. Or, the Internet decides to drop a Web page that I'm trying to look at. Or, that e-mail that clicked to open just sits there staring me in the face, laughing as it waits to pull up! Not to mention the endless pop-ups! I got tired of all those things happening to my system.

So it came down to a few choices at that point: Reinstall Windows (which is something I wasn't prepared to do at that point) Or, search for alternatives that would help speed up my system. So I set out on a search to see what could be done.

After hours and hours of searching and speaking with friends I came up with some ideas that can help speed up my computer while keeping all my pictures, movies, games, and documents intact. To my relief I was able to speed my system up to the point where it wasn't unbearable to work with.

So here is one thing that I did to help with my computer woes. These steps were done on Windows XP and will work with any version of XP, Vista, Windows ME and Windows 98.

Msconfig is the utility that helped the most out of all the settings I changed. Those icons that seem to clutter the task bar by the clock and just appear out of nowhere can slow your system down drastically. So msconfig allows you to turn those off so that they aren't running all the time. Granted, there are a few you may want to run, but the majority of those programs can be disabled. Here is what I did to use that utility.