How to make your WindowsOS execute faster?

My Windows XP becomes slower and slower over the time. Therefore, I had to google the internet and look for tools and tricks to optimize my Windows XP as much as possible. However, there fore many so called "Windows optimization tricks" does not work as it specified at the web-page. After several rounds of retry, I listed those steps I think useful for my Windows XP optimization.

1. Remove unnecessary software and components, especially Windows Index services;

    Go to Control Panel-> Add or Remove programs, check those rarely used software, whether it is installed intentionally or unintentionally, then uninstall those you don't need.

    Go to Control Panel-> Add or Remove programs -> Add/Remove Windows Components, remove those components you don't need. For example, Windows indexing service.

    Disable unnecessary start-up items. Google "Windows Startup Manager" will list tools to help on this topic.

2. Delete unnecessary files;

    Many Windows optimization tools offer some utility to clean up the unnecessary files. I am using this one: http://www.ccleaner.com/

    The tool can only delete temp files created by some installation process or Windows application. If you downloaded a file and later forgot it, the tool won't know it. So it is important for you to make your directory structure organized. For me, I create a <Root>/Data directory to store all human created data (versus directory created by installation binaries). I always download any article to <root>/Data/temp first, and only move valuable binary or documents to my permanent directory structure if I think it is useful.

3. Optimizing you Windows appearance

    Go to Control Panel->System->Advanced->performance Settings->Visual Effects, choose Custom and tick:

         Show shadows under menus

         Show translucent selection rectangle

         Smooth edges of screen fonts

         Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop

         Use visual styles on windows and buttons

    You may have some other preference, but I found this tick-list is most close to Windows default and what I feel comfortable.

4. Stop unnecessary Windows services:

    Windows starts a lot services by default, most of them are not necessary, so Go to Start->Cmd->services.msc and select Which services you want to stop. However,  many web page on optimization tricks ask you to go through the service one by one and stop a lot services, which maybe harder for novices.  Besides all the default setting, I only changed 3 of them to manual: Remote Registry, Telnet, Indexing Services.

5.  Clean up registry;

     It is dangerous to edit Windows registry (though sometimes I do), better find a tool to do it automatically.

6. Irq14=4096.

    It is said add Irq14=4096 will improve the hard-disk performance. I did so, but not sure whether my hard-disk performance is improved, nor did I figure out the reason. The paper said is increased the buffer for hard-disk read/write, but I did not figure out what is the default buffer setting.

7. De-fragment your hard-disk regularly;

    Find you C: or D: drive at Windows explorer, and click property, use your Windows tool to de-fragment the hard-drive, and reboot it.