This set of tweaks is designed to increase performance and startup of your computer.

NOTE: Please be careful when editing the Registry; you can do a lot of damage here.  Don't change or delete anything unless you know exactly what it is.

Turn off indexing
By default Windows XP indexes files on your hard drive and stores them in memory to speed up its' built-in search.  But if you rarely use Windows search, turn off indexing to free up memory and CPU horsepower for the files and applications you actually do use.  Windows search will still work if you perform these steps, but it will work a little more slowly than if indexing was enabled.
1. Open My Computer and right click on the C: drive and select Properties
2. Uncheck Allow Indexing Service....
3. Click Apply
4. Select Apply changes to C:.., subfolders and files when the Confirm Attribute Changes window opens.
5. Click OK
6. If the Error Applying Attributes window opens...click Ignore All
7. Click OK when finished

Right click My Computer and select Properties

Hardware Tab
1. Click Hardware Profiles...you should only have 1 profile listed.
Under Hardware profiles selection....Select the bottom option and set the seconds to 0.
2. Click OK

Advanced Tab
Click Error Reporting
One of the new features of Windows XP is the error reporting feature that offers to send diagnostic information to Microsoft whenever an application or part of the system crashes.  There are a number of reasons why you may want to reduce or turn this feature off, particularly if your computer is not connected to the Internet.
1. Select Disable error reporting
2. Click OK

Performance

Click Settings button
1. Select Custom
2. Uncheck everything except the bottom one "Use visual styles on windows and buttons"
3. Click Apply
4. Click OK

Remote Tab
1. Make sure both boxes are unchecked
2. Click Apply

Automatic Updates Tab
1. Select Turn off Automatic Updates
2. Click Apply
Depending on your settings, Windows XP may routinely activate the Windows Update feature to scan for and download updates to Windows XP automatically.  If you have a fast Internet connection, and would rather not have your work/game interrupted, you'll probably want to disable automatic updating.  You can always manually check for updates which is what I do once a week.

Speed up menu display
When using the start menu the you will notice a delay between different tiers of the menu hierarchy.   For a much better computer experience I recommend changing this value to 100.  This will allow the different tiers to appear almost instantly.

1. Click Start....Run....type REGEDIT....hit enter
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER..Control Panel..Desktop
3. Select MenuShowDelay from the list on the right.
4. Right on it and select Modify.
5. Change the value to 100.
6. Reboot your computer.

Adjust Browser Cache Sizes (Internet Explorer 6)
The maximum size of your Internet Explorer browser cache is ### megabytes.  Generally, cache sizes above 80 megabytes waste disk space and can actually cause slower performance.

How to adjust the IE cache size

1. Start Internet Explorer
2. Select Tools....Internet Options....General tab
3. Under Temporary Internet Files click the Settings button. In the box for the amount of disk space to use, enter a value between 5 and 80 megabytes.  I have mine set to 80.
4. Click OK to accept the changes.

Speed up browsing in windows explorer:
If your not on a network or run a network then this tip will speed up your file/folder browsing in windows explorer.

1. Open My Computer
2. Go to....Tools....Folder Options
3. Go to View tab
4. Uncheck "Automatically search for network folders and printers". It's the very first entry under Files and Folders.
5. Click Apply and then OK