4 Steps on How to Optimize and Speed Up Windows 7

It is nice to have a PC with Windows that is fully optimized to meet user’s needs. There are some features or parts of the computer that can be enhanced for the easy accomplishment of tasks and speed up computer performance. This article will reveal some steps on how to optimize and speed up Windows 7.

Optimize External Hard Drive

A user can do away with external drives without losing any data. This is made possible with the aid of write cache. Write caching is disabled for external drives by default in Windows. If a user enables write cache, it will supply noteworthy performance boost for external drives. It does comes a trade-off, there’s a risk of data loss in the event of power failure, so be warned. This is done by:

• Navigate to Start and then type “Device Manager” to open it.

• Expand “Disk drives” and right-click the external hard drive then select Properties.

• Choose the “Policies” tab and then select “Optimize for performance”

• Check “Enable write caching on the device” and then “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device” then choose OK.

• Reboot the computer to apply the changes done.

Increase SATA Disk Performance

Enabling the write cache will also improve the SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) hard drive performance.

• Choose the desired SATA drives and execute the steps 1, 2 and 3 in optimizing hard drive.

• Check only the “Enable write caching on the device” and select OK.

• Reboot the computer to apply the changes made.

Quicker Windows 7 Taskbar

This will lessen the number of resources utilized to make the Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail previews:

• Hit Start and type in “regedit” to open the registry Editor

• Left-click the expandable arrow next to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” and “Software” to expand and get to Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\Advanced folder.

• Right-click on Advanced and choose “New DWORD”, and then key in the value: “ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime”

• Right-click “ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime” then choose “Modify”. Select “Decimal Base” and type in the new number in milliseconds. The appropriate number to employ is 200.

• Choose OK and then reboot the computer.

Quicker Mouse and Menus

This step will lessen the amount of time it takes for menus to appear.

• Hit Start and type in “regedit” to open the Registry Editor

• Left-click expandable arrow next to HKEY_CURRENT_USER and expand Control Panel folder then choose “Desktop”

• Locate “MennuShowDelay” located in the right-hand side then double-click it. Reduce the value to any number between 400(default) and 1 – lower number has slower delay in ms between clicking on a menu and the action taking place.

• Select “Mouse” which is below the desktop on the left. Locate “MouseHoverTime” on the right hand side and then double-click. Select little number for quicker mouseovers.

• Reboot the computer afterwards.

Follow the mentioned steps accordingly to improve features and speed up Windows 7.

This guest article is by David Ritchie. David is a technical freelance writer currently interested in Mac data recovery and registry cleaner reviews.