11. Uninstall Unnecessary Software

If you had Windows 7 pre-installed on a new PC there is a good chance that you had several useless applications bundled with the operating system. If you aren’t going to use them, then you may as well remove them. Common examples are ISP trials , toolbar applications (Yahoo, Google), time limited shareware software (often DVD burner or Photo applications such as Sonic, Roxio and Corel).

Users can take a look at the system tray to see if there is any software running in the background that you rarely or never use. Uninstalling this clutter has the potential to speed up your system if it has processes that run in the background.

You can load up the “add/remove programs” tool and browse the list to see which applications are never used. If you are unlikely to use them again in the future, uninstall it and save some disk space.

12. Change Windows 7 visual effects

Windows 7 includes additional eye-candy in the form of shadows, window transparency and other extras. Adding these graphical features does require a small amount of extra power, which most modern computers can handle easily. However, older PCs may wish to turn off some effects to improve overall performance.

If you are trying to gain the maximum possible performance then you can disable all these visual effects.

13. Make use of Keyboard Shortcuts

Using keyboard shortcuts won’t speed up Window 7 per-se, however it will speed up your interaction with the OS which has the same overall effect.

Microsoft Windows 7 contains some old the usual keyboard shortcuts, but also plenty of new ones.

14. Disable Search Indexing

This is a feature whereby Windows 7 will scan your hard drive and create an index of many of the files, e-mails and media items on your PC. When you want to perform a search, this will greatly speed up the result retrieval in most cases. However, building and updating this index can slow your PC down when it is in progress.

If you know that you are unlikely to ever use the search feature or want advanced control over your file searches then you may as well disable the index. This will prevent extra hard drive activity during day to day computing.

Most users will not want to disable search indexing as it will also take out the start menu search box - this tip is mainly for those wishing to gain every ounce of extra performance.

15. Disable Gadgets

Windows 7 uses customisable gadgets which you can place anywhere on the desktop, unlike the sidebar previously seen in Windows Vista. Some of these gadgets are quite active and take up a small portion of system resources to display and update. Turning off all gadgets will speed up your system that little bit more.

You can close all of the gadgets so that none display, of if you wish to go a step further, the entire Windows 7 gadgets platform can be disabled.

16. Choose High Performance Power Plan

This tip relates more to mobile computing (i.e. laptops, netbooks and tablet PCs), as the power options can change when you are using battery or mains power. Often it makes sense to choose an energy-saving plan (hence lower performance) when you are using your device on the move, however you should make sure that you are running a high-performance plan when running from mains power.

Advanced power plan settings allow you to adjust a wide range of hardware power-saving/performance features. You can even change the min/max CPU usage, which can have a huge performance hit when set incorrectly.

17. Use Hibernate/Sleep Mode

Effective use of the hibernation and sleep modes will allow you to resume working on your PC very quickly, instead of having to wait for Windows 7 to boot up again. The hibernate feature will save your current system memory to disk and power down the machine, which means that your last session is resumed within moments of powering the machine back up. This is a great way to keep documents and other work open if you will be continuing work on them the next day. You can find out how to enable hibernation mode on your Windows 7 PC here.

Sleep mode does not power down your machine, but it puts the computer hardware into a low-power state. If you are going to leave your machine for a few hours, this is a good way to maintain and quickly resume your system state without power your machine down. You can put Windows 7 in to sleep mode automatically (by configuring this in your power plan), or manually by clicking on the corresponding option on the shutdown menu.

18. Use an efficient Anti-Virus package

Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware packages can contribute the performance drag of a PC, which some users dislike enough to go without real-time security software (although this is strongly not recommended for most users!). A good way to achieve a sensible balance between protection and speed is to use an efficient anti-virus package that has a low resource footprint.

You can use the AV Comparatives website to view benchmarks and performance testing on all of the major anti-virus applications. This should help you choose a security package that performs well and suits your system power.

19. Run periodic Anti-Spyware scans

Although many tech-savvy readers will have some sort of anti-malware scanner on their computer, it is worth reiterating this for those that don’t yet use it. I wouldn’t recommend relying on this software, but it can be a useful tool if you unintentionally end up installing spyware software (often in the form of near-useless free downloads).

MBAM is one of the more highly rated applications, and it’s worth running once in a while to see if anything prompts further investigation.