How to Increase the Speed of Windows XP

Follow these steps and make it fast and furious again..
Services You Can Disable
There are quite a few services you can disable from starting automatically.This would be to speed up your boot time and free resources. They are only suggestions so I suggestion you read the description of each one when you run Services
and that you turn them off one at a time.Some possibilities are:

• Alerter 
• Application Management 
• Clipbook 
• Fast User Switching 
• Human Interface Devices 
• Indexing Service 
• Messenger 
• Net Logon 
• NetMeeting 
• QOS RSVP 
• Remote Desktop Help Session Manager 
• Remote Registry 
• Routing & Remote Access 
• SSDP Discovery Service 
• Universal Plug and Play Device Host 
• Web Client

Cleaning the Prefetch Directory
Windows XP has a new feature called Prefetch. This keeps a shortcut to recently used programs.
However it can fill up with old and obsolete programs.
To clean this periodically go to:

• Start / Run / Prefetch
• Press Ctrl-A to highlight all the shorcuts
• Delete them

Not Displaying Logon, Logoff, Startup and Shutdown Status Messages
To turn these off:

• Start Regedit
• Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system
• If it is not already there, create a DWORD value named DisableStatusMessages
• Give it a value of 1

Clearing the Page File on Shutdown

• Click on the Start button
• Go to the Control Panel
• Administrative Tools
• Local Security Policy
• Local Policies
• Click on Security Options
• Right hand menu - right click on "Shutdown: Clear Virtual Memory Pagefile"
• Select "Enable"
• Reboot

For regedit users.....
If you want to clear the page file on each shutdown:

• Start Regedit
• Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memorymanagement\ClearPageFileAtShutdown
• Set the value to 1

No GUI Boot
If you don't need to see the XP boot logo,

• Run MSCONFIG
• Click on the BOOT.INI tab
• Check the box for /NOGUIBOOT

Speeding the Startup of Some CD Burner Programs
If you use program other than the native Windows XP CD Burner software,you might be able to increase the speed that it loads.

• Go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Services
• Double-click on IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service
• For the Startup Type, select Disabled
• Click on the OK button and then close the Services window

If you don't You should notice