CNET, Speed Up Your Windows PC

I mentioned a while ago how CNET has free online courses. Many different topics and the information provided is worthwhile. I'm currently taking two courses, HDTV 101 and Speed Up Your Windows PC. I'm a bit behind in both courses, but one tip to speed up your pc has worked pretty good.
I use Webshots for my wallpaper and screensaver, which reminds me, I need to download some new scenes. I'm really not willing to part with Webshots, but if you are, one way to speed up your PC is to do this:

Go to Control Panel and choose Display (you may have to click Appearance and Themes first).
On the Themes tab, change your current theme to Windows Classic, which uses fewer resources than the new look does. You can then click the Appearance tab and change that look to suit yourself.

The following tip I did use and it seems to have sped things up a bit:

Go into Control Panel and choose System (you may have to click Performance and Maintenance first).
Click the Advanced tab.
In the Performance box, click Settings.
You can now select Adjust for best performance, or you can choose Custom and play around with the settings. The more you uncheck, the less work your computer will have to do.


If you are interested in speeding up your file browsing, you might want to try this:

Open My Computer.
Click the Tools menu.
Choose Folder Options.
Click the View tab.
Uncheck “Automatically search for network folders and printers.”
Click OK.

This prevents Windows from automatically searching your network for folders and files, unless you ask it to.