How To Speed Up Opera

Opera is a cross-platform web browser and Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting online and displaying Widgets.
In addition to the web browser, the other main component in the desktop versions of the Opera suite is the Opera Mail client, previously known as M2. Opera Mail supports regular POP and SMTP mail as well as IMAP. It also has an Address book. Opera Mail also features a newsreader and a newsfeed reader for RSS and Atom, as well as an IRC client for online chat.

Here are a few tricks to speed up Opera:

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences..., click on the Advanced tab and find Network on the left side of the window. Now click Server name completion.
If you uncheck Try name completion and Look for local network machine, Opera will stop cycling your CPU, trying to guess what you're typing in the address bar.

2. To speed up internet browsing in Opera, go to Network under Preferences, and set Max connections to a server to 16, and Max total connections to 20.

This is recommended for Broadband users, such as cable or DSL. If you don't have broadband, set it to something smaller, like 8/16.

3. Users of old computers should probably turn javascript off by default unless a page requires it. This is one of the biggest slowdowns for webpage loading, since Java, and Javascript can be very complex, and take a long time to load. Remember F12 toggles these settings easily and quickly.
4. Put the cache on a drive different to the one your operating system is installed and keep the drives well defragmented. A good idea is to put the cache directory on a flash disk. To put the cache somewhere else, add the following line to the [User Prefs] section of opera6.ini:

Cache Directory4=your\path\here

You can find the opera6.ini file in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile.

5. Favicons will use resources, if you need absolutely minimal resource usage, turn them off. You can do this by going to Tools -> Preferences... -> Advanced -> Browsing and selecting Show no icons under the Page icons section.

6. Use standard windows skin, and disable special effects, which will save a few CPU cycles.

7. One more thing. You can change the process priority of Opera to get a further enhancement (set to high). Do this only if you are not multitasking with other apps.