Windows only: Free application Game XP tweaks your computer's performance by adjusting system settings, CPU priorities, and disabling unnecessary Windows services. As the name suggests, Game XP was developed with gaming in mind. It's not an application you'll run all the time, but if you're launching a CPU-intense app—like a game, for example—Game XP makes quick tweaks to optimise your system and improve your experience. You can toggle what you want Game XP to fiddle with, including video card, network, memory, and cosmetic settings. I highlighted Game XP when I detailed how to trim down Windows to the bare essentials, but we've never featured it on its own. Some users have experienced problems with Game XP, but I've run it on my slim Windows install regularly without issues, so your mileage may vary. Thanks Andy!

Windows XP/2000 only: Free Windows utility Service Profiles, crafted by helpful programmer Eóin at the Donation Coder site, lets you customise which background services are running or will fire up next time you boot your computer, saved into switchable setups. So if you need an ultra-light system for a high-intensity game, or just need to eliminate background distractions while working with a certain program, Service Profiles is a great alternative to manual tweaking or even re-installation. The coder even includes pre-built profiles derived from Black Viper's well-known configurations. Service Profiles is a free download for Windows XP/2000 only.

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Windows only: Put your high-priority programs and files in the most easily-accessed parts of your hard drive with UltimateDefrag, a free Windows utility. The program does all the normal data-ordering of a standard defragmenting app (and probably runs at roughly the same speeds), but lets you choose which data to place on the outer, or faster, portions of your disk. You can also ask UltimateDefrag to analyse your drive and see which files have been most recently accessed, which works best for drives or partitions set aside for data, or automatically try to improve ease of access. UltimateDefrag can also run as your default defrag tool, and run only when a screensaver is active. UltimateDefrag is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Windows only: Freeware application FreeSnap maximises your active window one edge at a time through a handful of simple keyboard shortcuts. If you're obsessed with making the most of your screen real estate, don't want to maximise windows to take up the entire screen in all directions, and manually resizing windows to the edge of your screen is too much of a hassle, FreeSnap is a perfect solution. Windows-Left/Right/Up/Down will expand your window to the corresponding side of your monitor, while other shortcuts resize windows to specific dimensions or move windows to pre-defined positions on your screen. FreeSnap is freeware, Windows only.

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Windows XP/NT only: We've shown you how to trim Windows down to the bare essentials and setting up pre-fetching for faster booting, but how do you know if your painstaking changes are having any real effect? BootTimer, a free measurement utility, asks you to restart your computer, then uses system logs to measure the distance between your boot-up screen to Windows log-in. You'll need to enable the program to run without prompting (un-check the "Ask before running this file" option on double-clicking in XP), and there's a small bit of promotion/donation prompting after it's done, but it's much easier than digging through verbose logs with a calculator. BootTimer is a free download for Windows NT and XP systems only.

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Windows only: Instead of dropping cash on a new stick of RAM for that old computer, go grab a free licence for the normally $20 memory manager TweakRAM—today only. TweakRAM speeds up your machine by optimising Windows memory management, and when your computer slows to a crawl, you can use TweakRAM to manually free up memory. The developers say:

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Blogger Samar Kamat loves keeping up with his favourite web sites with Google Reader, but noticed Reader can take forever to load feeds with longer items. His solution? Switch to List View.

The default view in Reader is the Expanded View, which is great for 80% of feeds, like Slashdot, where posts are short and concise. However, for very verbose and object-heavy posts, it takes a load off of your bandwidth to load only one page at a time. So next time you're waiting for the images on your tutorial to load, just switch to List View and enjoy the speed.

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When you're installing Windows in a virtual machine or on old, slow hardware, you want the leanest, meanest and fastest-running configuration possible. Most of the time, you want the best from your operating system, including all the bells and whistles. Other times, you don't want the default, bloated Windows installation, with every single built-in feature slowing you down. Luckily, whether you want to put Windows on a diet in a virtual machine or you want to get Windows up and running all snappy-like on older hardware, you've got a handful of excellent and free options at your disposal. Let's take a look at a few ways to trim down your Windows installation so that it takes up less space on your hard drive and eats less RAM while it's running.

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You can do a lot of things with Google Desktop, and use it as an advanced widget and sidebar engine—but what if you really just want a better system-wide search tool? The Google Operating System blog drills down on the latest Google Desktop release to get better performance and speed out of its file-finding function. From staight-up preference changing to registry hacking, you can force the handy app to focus only on those things you want to retrieve later even before installation, but the author recommends at least one change for new and existing users alike:

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Windows guy Dennis O'Reilly points out a few Windows registry tweaks that will make your PC "close shop like it's late for the bus ride home." These modifications will shorten the amount of time Windows waits around before killing hanging applications, and will set your PC to automatically stop running tasks. If Windows takes a little too much time to shut itself down, these may be for you; of course keep in mind that registry tweaks shouldn't be done lightly or without a full backup.

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