Follow these tips and you will definitely have a much faster and more reliable PC! Most of the below tips works for windows 98 1. Wallpapers: They slow your whole system down, so if you're willing to compromise, have a basic plain one instead!
2. Drivers: Update your hardware drivers as frequently as possible. New drivers tend to increase system speed especially in the case of graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very frequently! 3. Minimizing: If you want to use several programs at the same time then minimize those you are not using. This helps reduce the overload on RAM.
4. Boot Faster: The 'starting Windows 95/98' message on startup can delay your booting for a couple of seconds. To get rid of this message go to c: and find the file Msdos.sys. Remove the Read-Only option. Next, open it in Notepad or any other text editor. Finally, go to the text 'Options' within the file and make the following changes: Add BootDelay=0. To make your booting even faster, set add Logo=0 to remove the Windows logo at startup. 5. Restart only Windows: When restarting your PC, hold down Shift to only restart Windows rather than the whole system which will only take a fraction of the time. 6. Turn Off Animations: Go to Display Settings from the Control Panel and switch to the Effects Tab. Now turn off Show Windows Content While Dragging and Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts. This tip is also helpful with Windows XP because of the various fade/scroll effects. 7. Faster Start-Menu Access: Go to the Start menu and select Run. Now type Regedit and hit Enter. The Registry Editor will appear on the screen. Now, open the folder HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop. You should see a MenuShowDelay value. If you don't then do the following: right click on a blank space in the right pane and select NewString. Change the name in the new value to MenuShowDelay. Now that we have the MenuShowDelay value, double click on it and enter 0 in the value data field. This sets the start menu delay to 0 milliseconds.
8. Resolutions: If you are willing to do anything for faster performance from your PC, then try lowering your display resolution. The lower it is, the faster your PC. 9. Turn off Active Desktop: Go to your Display Properties and switch to the Web tab. Uncheck View My Active Desktop As a Web Page. Since the Active Desktop option under Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources, this option can have a dramatic effect on the speed of the whole system. 10. Defragment Often: Windows 98's Defrag tool uses Application Acceleration from Intel which means that when you defragment your drive, data is physically arranged on the drive so that applications will load faster. 11. Take your PC to Bed: Using the Advanced Power Management feature under Windows 98 gives you the option to use the sleep command. That way, you can send your PC to sleep instead of shutting it down and then restarting it. It's as simple as pressing a button and then pressing the same button to wake it up. You can tell Windows after how many minutes/hours of inactivity to automatically sleep the machine in the Advanced Power Management section of the Control Panel. 12. Faster Internet Access: If you use the internet for reference and the sites you visit are rarely updated then try the following. In IE (the same can be done in Netscape) go to Tools, Internet Options. Next, click on Settings... in the Temporary Internet Files section. Finally, select Never for the first option and double the amount of storage space to use, click OK! 13. Benchmarking: Benchmarking can be very useful when run frequently. It can tell you how your PC's components are performing and then compare them to other machines like yours. For example, when you overclock your PC, you want to know how much more speed you have and whether it is stable. All this and more can be discovered using benchmarking. An excellent piece of software for doing this job is SiSoft Sandra which can be found in the Downloads File Archive!
14. Refresh the Taskbar without restarting: If you in some way change the taskbar, either in Regedit or elsewhere, you can refresh the task bar without restarting. Hold down Ctrl Alt Del, and double click on Explorer. Say Yes to close Explorer, but no to closing Windows. This will refresh the Taskbar and system tray. 15. Quick CD Eject: Instead of pushing the button on your drive, right-click your CD drive letter in My Computer and click on Eject. This will also remove any icons that have become associated with the CD drive. 16. Start Up Programs: Windows can be slowed down when programs run on start up. To eliminate this, check your Start up folder. You can access it from the start menu: Start, Programs, Start Up. Another way to eliminate programs from loading even before Windows actually starts is by doing the following: Click on Start, then Run. Type msconfig. It will take quite a long time for this program to load, but when you finally see it on your screen, explore the different tabs. They all have to do with how quickly your PC boots, so select what you want, and uncheck what you don't want! 17. Fonts: When Windows starts, it loads every single font in the Fonts folder. Therefore, the more fonts you have, the slower the booting process. To get rid of unwanted fonts, simply go to the Fonts folder under c:windows and remove whatever you don't want. Fonts that have a red letter 'A' as their icon are system fonts, so don't delete them. 18. Stretching Wallpapers: Don't "stretch" your wallpaper in Windows 98 since it actually slows Windows down when you drag icons around on the desktop. 19. RAM Matters: If you have less than 32MB then you should seriously think of upgrading it to at least 64MB. Windows runs much more smoothly with 64MB or higher and tends to use less hard disk space for virtual memory. 20. Partitioning: A very nice little thing you can do to boost system performance. By partitioning your hard drive, splitting one physical drive into several logical ones, you can gain several advantages. 1. If you get a virus or you accidentally format a drive, not all will be lost. 2. By placing the swap file (Win386.swp) on a separate drive, The swap file will be less fragmented and thus, faster. 3. Place Windows on a separate drive and whenever you need to reinstall it, you rest assured that your data is safe on a separate drive. Partitioning can be done using a few programs such as FDisk which comes with DOS. However, FDisk formats everything on the hard disk before partitioning. Alternatively, you can use Partition Magic from Power Quest to partition your hard disk without losing your data.

 CONVERT XP TO VISTA

Many of us still think Vista is too Expensive and of course it is. Another bad thing about Vista is the compatibility. So, why don’t just turn our Windows XP into Vista.
I had installed Vista ultimate on my PC a Couple of months ago. I worked fine but I really hated it because:

• I was not able to install my Sound card on it.
• I was not able to Install Nero on it.

Everything else was a charm, especially the Windows Aero and 3D flip ( Vista is all about these two things). Everything else was like XP, and XP is also much faster than Vista. So I got rid of Windows Vista. But I really missed the Aero effect.
After a month I figured how to turn my Windows XP in Windows Vista. It looked so much similar to Vista that my brother got confused so did everybody else who saw it. Here are the screenshots of my Windows XP PC which look like Vista.





Here is how you can also turn XP in Vista:
First you need to patch Uxtheme.dll, because the themes won’t work if you have not patched it. Download this patcher which will do it for you and the Restart your PC.
Next thing you need to do is to find a good theme. The one I used in the above screenshots can be downloaded from here. You can find Vista themes here. When you have downloaded the Desired theme, Unzip it and copy it to C:WINDOWSResourcesThemes.
Get a nice Vista wallpaper over here or you can also search for them in google.
Now download the vista sounds and Unzip/Copy the to C:WINDOWSMEDIA folder. Goto Windows Control panel >> Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices >> Sounds and change the sound for respective events.
For the Vista like "Taskbar Screenshot Utility" (I can’t find any other good word for it) download Vista Task Tips and install it. You can resize the screenshot by scrolling the mouse wheel. Now when you hover a open window in Taskbar, it shows you a screenshot of it.
For the Aero Effect I use this. And for 3D flip I use Winplosion.
For Sidebar I use Google sidebar bundled with Google desktop. There are many others and better sidebars for XP than Google sidebar but I like Google’s because it adds functionality to your desktop, and because I use many other services of Google which are integrated with Google Desktop. Other can be downloaded here, here and here
For the start menu I used VistaStart and downloaded some Vista Screensavers from here. I downloaded the Vista cursors and Vista icons.
To make my OS look more like Vista I used the Vista theme for my aVast antivirus software and which can be downloaded here. I also downloaded the Vista theme for Firefox. I changed the color scheme of Office 2007 to black which gives it a Vistaish feel. I also downloaded the Vista Explorer to make my PC more like Vista If you know some any other tweaks, let them come in comments.



WINDOWS ACTIVATION.

 

I personally dont lie doin this, but one cant deny the possiblities around,
This article i guess solve all the Enigma for the users surfing day and night in search of
keyword "Windows Xp hack" including specialized setups.

this is not recommended and u must use the genuine Softwares
especially the Operating Systems!!




-======================================-
Windows 2003 & XP & LH
Anti Product Activation
-======================================-

The crack will patch some bytes in your
winlogon.exe and totally disable the
Windows Product Activation Check.

Tested with winlogon.exe build:
Windows XP 2600.0 (Retail)
Windows 2K3 3790.0 (Retail)
Windows XP 2600.2180 (SP2 RTM)
Windows XP 2600.1106 (SP1)
Windows 2K3 3790.1218 (8.7.2004)
Windows Longhorn 4008 or 4015(not tested by myself)

This version uses a generic patch engine
which supports all current version of Windows
and hopefully all future ones.


The Options
===========

1. Read all about the options.
2. Don't change anything you without a reason.


* Apply OOBE Fix
This applies the Out Of Box Experience ->OOBE Patch
which removes the 'Activate Windows' link from the
start menu and makes the Activating Windows Dialog
saying 'Already Activated'

Note: This is more a cosmetically fix and really not
needed for the patch to work properly.


* Apply WPA Fix
This removes the WPA-Check in Winlogon.exe.
If you want to get rid of the Windows Activation
this MUST be Enabled !
Disable this if you just want to undo the OOBE-Fix.

Note: However you can use this program also to
decrypt and unprotect other MS-Files
like DPCDLL.dll or LICDLL.DLL. So if you
do so disable this option.


* Remove selfcheck blocks
If you press the 'Apply' Button the self checks are always
disable by 'correcting' the pointer.

This option will additionally overwrite the self check block
calls in the program code with the Value 90 (NOP=No OPeration)
and will improve the readability of disassembly.

Note: This option is absolutely not necessary for the patch to work.


* Remove crypt blocks
This will decrypt the crypt program parts of the input file and
write them back to into the exe and do some other fixes to keep the
File executable. If you want to disassemble the file enable this one.

Note: This option is absolutely not necessary for the patch to work.


* Debug: Save decrypted code to *.bin
Writes each decrypted program parts into a file with the
address as filename looking like this: 2C18D.bin, 3678B.bin...


* Debug: Save decrypted code to exe
Writes each decrypted program parts back into the file.
If the option 'Remove crypt blocks' is not check just the decrypted
RAW-Output is written into the exe. (After you enable this you
have to right click on 'Apply/Browse' and open the file you want
to decrypt)

Note: This option is dangerous!
Without having 'Remove crypt blocks' option enabled this will
make crash the input file crash for sure.
This option is absolutely not necessary for the patch to work.


* Debug: Verbose Output
Output Debug information
This may be helpful to identify some problems.