I am an avid gamer and I am sure that many of you out there want to speed up you r computer for a myrad of reasons, well it seems the good folks at Computer Gami ng World know how to tweak their systems. Here are FIVE tweaks to help speed up the performance of Windows XP. #1: Murder the Maintainance Apps Start by choosin g the System icon in the Control Panel. There are three things here to eliminate : System Restore, Automatic Updating, and Remote Assistance. Navigate each tab a nd check or uncheck the appropriate boxes and select the appropriate radio butto ns to cleanse your system of these largely useless applications. #2: Toss out Wi ndows Messaging Ready to kill that stupid little buddy icon that nobody uses? Ch oose Start and Run, and type C:\Windows\INF\SYSOC.INF. Substitute your Windows d irectory if necessary. This will open up a text file that maliciously hides some programs from the Add/Remove Programs folder. Find the line that starts with "m smsgs=" and edit the word "hide" out of it. Save the file, open Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs, and click on the Windows components button. Scroll down, an d you'll find Windows Messaging just waiting to be unchecked. #3: Purge Unnecess ary Services Open Control Panel, selct Administrative Tools, and then select Ser vices. Here you'll see a list of things running in the background to enable cert ain functions of Windows XP. Some start automatically, and you don't need all of them. Turn them off by setting them to manual: right-click on the service, choo se Properties, pull down the Startup box, and select Manual. Some functions you will turn off include Automatic Updates, Error Reporting, Indexing, Internet Con nection Firewall (unless you're using it, of course), Messenger, NVIDIA Driver H elper, Portable Media Serial Number, System Restore, and Task Scheduler. #4: Rei gn the Swap File XP is conservative when it first sets up the paging file and th en uses precious resources to resize it. Take that control out of Windows' hands by making your swap files huge and static. Open the Control Panel and choose Sy stem, select the Advanced tab, click on Performance settings button, and go to t he Advanced tab. There, you can set your own swap file size. If you have a large drive and enough free space, make it 1000MB. Choose the Change button and make both the Initial and Maximum sizes 1000MB. Otherwise, make it as large as possib le. You'll have to reboot when you're done. #5: Get rid of stupid startup items. Finally, you can purge your system tray of silly files by hitting them where th ey live: in your Startup folder and "run" registry key. The easy way to do this is to use the System Configuration Utility. Launch it by hitting the Start butto n and then choosing Run. Type MSCONFIG. Choose the Startup tab. Uncheck anything frivolous, like Creative Labs AudioHQ, quick launchers from RealPlayer, MusicMa tch, WinAmp, Kazaa, Microsoft Office; and-unless you use their special functions -hardware utilities like MouseWare and Microsoft SideWinder. The beauty of the S ystem Configuration utility is that if you uncheck something and discover that p art of your system doesn't work, all you have to do is go back and check it agai n. Tweak written by or based on information submitted by Robb Frye Copyright 2001-2002 TweakXP.com