Wednesday, September 20, 2006

How to Speed up Winamp 5 and Adobe Reader

Darren Rowse at Problogger has come up with his another round of Group Writing Project and I have prepared this post just to enter this competion.
Here is a small tutorial using which speed up Winamp 5.xx loading time, speed and
background bandwidth usage. You might be knowing few of them if your a Tech Geek but I bet you don't know all of them.

Tips for Winamp

1. In Winamp Preferences (CTRL+P), untick the following in the General Preferences
section:-
Show splash screen
Check for new versions of Winamp at startup
Allow Winamp to report anonymous usage statistics
While in your General Preferences, ensure your Internet Connection Settings are correct LAN, DSL, Cable / Modem etc.)

2. Disable mini-visualisation (gives Winamp less to render)

3. Next, go to the Global Hotkeys section. If you don't use these, untick the Enabled
box so Winamp doesn't monitor the relevent code in the background.

4. Under the Skins > Modern Skins section, set the Timer resolution to 35ms. Most users will not need anything faster. Whilst you're in the Modern Skins section, click the Alpha Blending tab and untick the Enable Desktop Alpha Blending button.

5. Speed up playlist creation:- To speed up the process of playlist creation, you need to configure Winamp to hold off on gathering extended metadata (more than length and title) for each file until you actually play the song. Load each file's information individually by clicking Options, then Preferences, then Titles underneath General Preferences. Click Read metadata only when file(s) are played underneath Metadata reading.

Tip to increase Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader takes lot of time to load all its plugins. So, to speed up Adobe Reader
all you need to do is to disable automatic loading of plugings by using a utility
called Adobe Reader SpeedUp. Adobe Reader Speed-Up significantly decreases the amount
of time required for Adobe Reader to start by disabling most of the least used plugins.Also, the plugins can be freely enabled and disabled, if required.

This utility has decreased the time taken by Adobe Reader to load on my PC significantly and now I can view any PDF within 3-4 seconds.

Download Adobe Reader Speed-Up

If anyone has any other ideas, feel free to post them as a comment and I will include them here!

2 comments:

  1. Oh, I HAVE to do that for the Adobe Reader, it's so slow!! Our how-to is up as well if you'd like to check it out!!

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  2. Adobe is so slow! Thanks for the info! Thanks for participating in the Group Writing Project. My How To is up also.

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