99 Performance Tips for WinXP

[Chylde Roland]

From faster boot times, to speeding up your current hardware, PCstats has 99 Tips to make your computer run quicker, better, and more efficiently.


http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1590

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#23 has wrong info in it. Windows XP does NOT scale the size of the page file unless you set the min and max size. By default it sets a static size of 1.5x the RAM.

#24 is actually a perf HIT when using image / graphics applications (Photoshop, etc.).

#28 should be "Create a DWORD entry"

#29 is a symptom of something else being screwed up. If you use the following registry from our "Taming Windows XP" guide it will serve you better;

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer]
Value Name: DesktopProcess
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (1 = Separate Process, 0 = Default)

#76 I would not suggest even THINKING about this one. You can increase the speed to the logon screen if you turn off Fast User Switching (see our guide) and set the login to the WindowsNT style (also in our guide).

#92 makes no sense. If you have an unused device, take it off the system or disable it in the BIOS if it's not a physical device. Disabling it in the OS doesn't unload the driver from memory, nor does it stop any upper or lower drivers from sending requests to it.

A lot of these tips seem more like hardware / bios tweaks and system maintenance than actual Windows XP tweaks. A lot of good info though.

[Terry Penrod]

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Woah, it sounds as if we might not want to trust that web page if it has that many outright errors.

Thanks for the heads-up as I am in a real Win XP tweaking phase right now and just getting familar with the OS. So, I frankly don't know squat yet about what is and is not Kosher.

Cheers, Terry

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[Gaim Mastr]

Best thing to do is two-fold. First, only consider suggestions from highly-trusted sources. Second, make a restore point on your system before doing any tweaks, and then only do a very few tweaks at a time. That way if something goes wrong, or not quite the way you expected, it's less confusing for trying to reverse the problem tweak.

[Chylde Roland]

hehe, thanks for the feedback, Jackal! Trust the MicroBorg to point out the errors, thus the things we should avoid!

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