Speed up with these super drive tweaks

Getting the best performance out of your PC often involves making serious compromises: proceed with caution.

System Restore is an invaluable tool for fixing a broken PC, for instance. But it does consume lots of disc space and system resources. If you’re willing to put performance ahead of troubleshooting capabilities, click Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System>System Restore to turn it off.

Similarly, the Indexing Service is a handy way to speed up searches, but if you rarely go hunting for files then this can be turned off. Open Computer, right-click on the hard drive and clear the Index This Drive box.

Launch REGEDIT, and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem. Set NtfsDisable8dot3 NameCreation to 1 and it won’t create DOS-style shortened versions of file names, while setting NtfsDisableLastAccess Update means Windows won’t update the Last Accessed date on a folder when you view it. Both tweaks will help improve drive performance a little, but could break old software.

And you can squeeze a little extra performance from a SATA drive by going to Control Panel> Performance and Maintenance> System > Device Manager> Hard Drives, then rightclicking your drive, selecting Policies and checking Enable Advanced Performance.

Beware: Microsoft says this increases the chance of data loss if the drive loses power. Only do this if you have backup like a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) or are willing to take the risk.