Article by R.J.Dunne
The XP operating system is still in widespread use today and struggles just as much as Vista or Windows 7 to manage the large volumes of web data they need to process. This article shows how to increase internet speed in XP without resorting to purchasing applications or editing the registry.
Start out by first getting a baseline status of how your connection is performing. Open the speedtest.net site and run their test to find the ping rate and upload/download speeds for your connection. You should run the test after each change to see if the results improve.
Run anti-virus and anti-malware/adware scan on your computer to make sure there are none present that could slow your PC speed.
Next use the Windows Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter to optimise your computer (XP has these in the properties popup for your hard drive). These types of computer maintenance and repair activities will help increase PC speed, disk access times and file caching which all goes to benefit how the browser and networking applications run.
Open your browser of choice and disable as many add-ons as you can happily do without. These add-ons can use a lot of your bandwidth and many run with every page you visit. Be picky about which ones stay enabled.
Knowing how to increase internet speed in XP, for IE users, requires a lot of Windows registry editing to manually modify network/TCP settings. In reality, you are better off leaving the registry alone or using a commercial tool to do this. The one recommended manual tweak you can do is to disable multimedia settings (under tools/ advanced) relating to audio, video and cleartype fonts.
In comparison, Firefox users can increase internet speed in XP quite simply using the Fasterfox add-on. The changes it makes can be manually made using the about:config page but doing so requires more in-depth knowledge to correctly reset some parameters.
About the Author
Rod is the editor at the PC Maintenance Reimage blog covering articles on how to repair computers, software reviews and other top-tips.


