I know this is an old story and you can easily found tons of similar tutorial or guide from any search engine such as CNET, 10 Simple Ways to Speed Up Windows XP, Speed Up Windows XP, 23 Ways To Speed WinXP Without Defrag and many others.

I’m strongly believed hard disk defragment is the main key point for speed up Windows XP. Personally I use Auslogics Disk Defrag and TuneXP.

For Auslogics Disk Defrag,

• download
• install
• run disk defrag

That’s simple.

For Tune XP,

• download
• install
• click Memory and file system
• Enable accelerate DLL unloading
• Enable faster shutdown
• Enable file allocation size tweak
• Enable optimize prefetch
• Enable increase NTFS performance
• Click Hardware
• Enable UDMA-66
• Enable increase CPU priority
• Enable increasing USB polling interval
• Enable speed up windows IRQ handling

Beside these 2 tools, I would suggest you should look at others tips such as:

• Turn Off Unnecessary Services
• Disable Indexing Services
• Disable Performance Counters
• Optimise Pagefile
• Always Clean Internet Cache and Cookies
• Remove all spyware
• Remove any unnecessary programs and/or items from Windows Startup
• Turn off any and all unnecessary animations, and disable active desktop
• Run BootVis – Improve Boot Times
• Set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay to “1″
• Run disk defragment frequently
• And etc.

I can sure 100% speed up your Windows XP box. I can easily open up any Microsoft Office applications within 3 to 5 seconds. Hope this can help.