How can you improve the performance of a computer upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 without hardware upgrades?

Setting the visual effects for best performance is an effective way to enhance the performance of a computer upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 without the need for hardware upgrades. Windows 7 features more advanced graphical interfaces and visual elements compared to Windows XP. By adjusting the settings to prioritize performance over appearance, you reduce the resources used by graphical effects, which can help improve the overall speed and responsiveness of the system.

This adjustment focuses on disabling or minimizing effects such as animations, shadows, and transparency that can consume significant CPU and memory resources, allowing the system to allocate more resources towards running applications smoothly.

While the other options may indeed contribute to performance improvements in different contexts, they either require hardware changes or may not provide as immediate or significant an impact on performance as adjusting visual effects.