Speed up SharePoint 2013 Labs

Q: I'm using SharePoint 2013 in a basic lab environment but pages are taking a long time to load, anything I can do to speed it up?

A: SharePoint 2013 has fairly high performance requirements, so make sure you meet these. I've seen a lack of memory cause problems. SharePoint 2013 now uses the FAST technology for its search, but if your SharePoint site isn't using search, you could disable this service to free up resources. In Services, stop the following and set to start Manual:

This might help speed up the respond of the SharePoint server. However, realize that this is going to stop Search results updating, which is typically a top benefit of SharePoint.