The conventional wisdom is that you can’t do much to optimize Windows anymore: Microsoft’s tweaked all the settings and you should just leave well enough alone. The conventional wisdom is wrong. If you want better performance and you don’t want to buy a new PC, John Paul Mueller’s’s quick, no-cost performance solutions might be all you need.

Don’t use Themes? Turn off the Themes service, and free a megabyte that could be doing something useful. Registry too fat and cluttered? Get on your pith helmet: Mueller will show you how to dive in and streamline it. Ever wonder why Windows’ built-in search is so slow? Maybe Windows XP is searching your compressed Zip files: that takes forever. If you don’t need Windows’ Zip feature, disable it, for snappier searches. Do you have a program that’s hogging memory and won’t let go? Mueller helps you find it and smack it into shape.

Full hard disk slowing you down? Mueller walks you through cleaning out all the useless data, temporary files, and other junk — giving you room for a larger swap file, new data, or whatever you’re planning to download next. (Did you know how much garbage Windows’ Disk Cleanup feature misses? Mueller does, and he points you to a free utility that picks up the crud Microsoft missed.)

As Mueller notes, optimization doesn’t just mean speed — it means improving reliability and usability, too. This book is about optimizing your entire Windows experience. We’re experienced computer users, but we were blown away by some of these techniques. We’ve got our copy of his book right here, and once this review’s done, we’re planning some serious optimization.