Tweak your performance
XP promises to punch up your PC's performance, and, in our tests, it got the job done. These five tips will enhance your performance with an older OS, but they can only do so much. Inevitably, you'll come up a tad short of XP's stellar performance. But who says you should stop trying?

More memory, please
Windows XP is as fast as Windows 2000 (which we relied on before XP showed up), and, according to our tests, it's speedier than either Windows 98 or Me.

To give Windows 98 or Me a kick in the behind, add more memory to your machine. This is a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone tip, since you'll probably need to add RAM to your machine if you intend to upgrade to XP down the road, as XP needs at least 128MB of RAM to work. Thankfully, memory is pretty cheap these days. At CNET Shopper, for instance, we found generic RAM priced at $45 for 256MB.

Crash-test dummy
No doubts on this end: Windows XP has proven to be the most solid, most stable Windows ever aimed at consumers. We've been running it for months and have had only one serious, blue-screen-of-death-style crash.

As we said, there's simply no way to make Windows 98 or Me as solid as XP. Instead, you should patch up an older OS as best as you can.

One way to smooth out your OS bumps is to purchase a crash protector. Crash protectors such as Symantec CrashGuard, now discontinued, were once integral parts of every cautious computer user's software collection. These utilities watch for system and application crashes, then try to intercept them before they bring down your whole OS or destroy chunks of data. There's only one survivor from the crash protector days of yore, and it's free. Download and install Stay Alive 2000 on your Windows 98 or Me machine. It's small--less than 1MB--and consumes a mere 200K of memory. Sure, it won't stop every crash, but it's better than facing a flaky OS alone.

Standby and Hibernate
Microsoft claims that XP resurrects itself from the power-saving Standby and Hibernate modes faster than Windows Me does. (In other words, the current state of your system is saved to hard disk so that it comes alive almost instantly when you later power it back on.) According to eTesting Labs, XP indeed recovers up to 19 percent faster--good news for laptop users who rely on these modes to save battery juice and get back to work quickly without forfeiting lots of power.

Both Windows Me and Windows 98 also support Standby and Hibernate, but, while this power-saving function is automatically available in Me, you have to turn it on in 98. Standby places your entire system in a low-power state (use it when you take a lunch break, for example), while Hibernate puts your machine in a deep sleep (use this mode overnight). To turn on Hibernate in Windows 98, select Settings > Control Panel, then open the Power Options (in Me) or Power Management (in 98) applet. Click the Hibernate tab. (If there is no Hibernate tab, your PC's hardware doesn't support this feature.) Check the Enable Hibernate Support box, then click OK. Now, when you choose Shut Down from the Start menu, the Hibernate option appears as one of the choices in the Shut Down Windows dialog.

If you encounter problems in Windows Me, use the built-in Power Management Troubleshooter to diagnose your problem (select Help from the Start menu, type troubleshooter into the Search field, then scroll down the resulting list and click Power Management Troubleshooter). If you're using Windows 98, download the Power Management Troubleshooter tool from Microsoft's Web site.

Help on tap
Windows XP boasts a much-improved help tool: it combines the traditional help tools that come bundled with Windows with the ability to query Microsoft's online support (assuming you're connected to the Internet), including its Knowledge Base database of problems and solutions.

There's no way to clone XP's Help and Support Center on other OSs, but you can improve the way you access technical support. Of course, the surest way to get help in a jiffy is to bookmark Microsoft Support in your browser. Microsoft recently redesigned its technical support site so that it's more organized and much easier to use than before. Search the Knowledge Base from the opening page of the site (use the search field at the left of the screen), access downloads, and post questions to Microsoft newsgroups.

For even faster access, you should also bookmark the appropriate support center for your version of Windows: Me, 98, or 2000. Also, bookmark the first page of the Microsoft newsgroup site to quickly browse for answers to common problems or to post your own question.

Smaller shots
Open the My Pictures folder (it's tucked inside My Documents) in Windows XP, and there's a link at the left side under "File and folder tasks" called E-mail This File. When you select an image and click this link, a "Send pictures via e-mail" dialog pops up, and, if you let it, Windows XP will reduce the size of your picture so that it uploads and downloads faster.

You can do the same thing in Windows 98 and Me if you have WinZip 8.1 installed. WinZip adds new commands to the right-click menu, so when you select any file, you'll see an option called Zip And E-mail that compresses any file (XP's tool is really intended for images) and attaches it to an outbound e-mail message ready for addressing.

XP's and WinZip's tools work equally well, but only when the original image is 800x600 pixels or smaller. When run through XP, larger digital photos are rendered much smaller (since the OS actually reduces resolution).

Get XP's tools without buying XP!