How to Speed Up Windows XP Shutdown

Windows takes long to Shutdown when third party or Microsoft applications have not properly unload from memory when exiting. Windows will keep trying to completely close them until finally decides that it can't and should shutdown. Even if you find the application causing the problem it may be impossible to do anything about it.

To fix this problem Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

After the installation open up your services list (Click start, then run and type services.msc, click OK), you should see one new service :

This free utility automatically cleans up user profiles reclaiming resources as soon as a task is finished and prevents you from wait when shutting down Windows XP.

Running the .cmd file contained will force Windows XP to shutdown in few seconds.

You may also need a fast user Log-off or a fast Restart.

How to Speed Up Firefox Page Rendering

Mozilla applications render web pages incrementally - they display what's been received of a page before the entire page has been downloaded. Since the start of a web page normally doesn't have much useful information to display, Mozilla applications will wait a short interval before first rendering a page: by default, Firefox doesn't try to render a web page for 250 milliseconds while it's waiting for data.

If you use about:config to add the Integer preference nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and set the value to 0, Firefox immediately starts to display the page, even without complete data (lower values will make a page initially display more quickly, but will make the page take longer to finish rendering. Higher values will have the opposite effect).