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| For Users with 256 MB RAM or more this tweak will boost
their Windows- and Game-Performance. What it does: It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left. Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" under the 386enh section. Restart your Windows and enjoy better Game performance ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Reduce 10 second scandisk wait time Start MS Dos Prompt (Start run CMD) CHKNTFS/T:4 where 4 is the amount of waity time CHKNTFS/? for more info ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Fresh install with no ACPI. Just press F5 after the first screen asking if you have raid devices to install (will ask at bottom of screen to press F6) keep pressing F5 to second screen where it will ask to press F2 for recovery console. Keep holding F5 and should get another screen where it will say that it cannot recognize type of pc. There you have two choices: standard pc and other. Select standard and voila no ACPI will be installed. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Keep high preformance and keep the GUI To increase system performance and keep the GUI: Right click my computer. Click properties. Click advanced. Click settings (under performance). Click Adjust for best performance. Scroll to the bottom and check the last one “use visual styles on windows and buttons”. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Turn off auto-expanding trees in Windows Explorer I'm sure some of you have noticed that in Windows Explorer, whenever you click a folder in the left pane, it automatically expands to show all subfolders. If you find this annoying, follow these steps... 1) close Windows Explorer if it's running 2) go Start -> Run, then type "regedit" 3) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced 4) Change the value of "FriendlyTree" to 0 5) close regedit, and start up Windows Explorer. Auto-expanding menus are now off for some reason, microsoft left this option out of the Windows Explorer options. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Windows 2000 CTRL+ALT+DEL Style If you want the Windows 2000 CTRL+ALT+DEL screen to appear in XP instead of immediatly jumping to the task manager simply deactivate the welcome screen: start > settings > control panel > change the way users log on and log off > uncheck "Use the welcome screen" now reboot your machine (it didnt work on my machine until I rebooted). now when you use CTRL+ALT+DEL you can do all the same things you could with 2000 (eg. Lock The Computer or force a shutdown) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Free-up some more disk space Windows XP uses a file called hiperfil.sys to save everything it needs when Windows XP goes into hibernation. If you are like me, and never use the hibernate function, you can turn it off. By turning hibernate off, Windows XP deletes the hiberfil.sys. This can free up the as much disk space as the amount of ram that you computer has. Go to Control Panel/Power Options/Hibernation and untick the box. It's as easy as that. Now you will have plenty more disk space to install those mega programs! ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Optimise NTFS NTFS is a great filesystem, but its feature-set comes at a slight cost in performance. You can negate this a little with the following tips: * By default NTFS will automatically update timestamps whenver a directory is traversed. This isn't a necessary feature, and it slows down large volumes. Disable it by pointing regedit to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem and set 'DisableNTFSLastAccessUpdate' to 1. * NTFS uses disparate master file control tables to store filesystem information about your drives. Over time these core MFT files grow and become fragmented, slowing down all accesses to the drive. By setting aside a little space, MFT's can grow without becoming fragmented. In the same key where you disabled the last access feature creat a new DWORD value called 'NtfsMftZoneReservation' and set it to 2. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Memory Performance Tweak These Settings will fine tune your systems memory management -atleast 256MB of ram recccomended go to start\run\regedit -and then to the following key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management 1.DisablePagingExecutive -double click it and in the decimal put a 1 - this allows XP to keep data in memory now instead of paging sections of ram to harddrive yeilds faster performance. 2.LargeSystemCache- double click it and change the decimal to 1 -this allows XP Kernal to Run in memory improves system performance alot 3.create a new dword and name it IOPageLockLimit - double click it and set the value in hex - 4000 if you have 128MB of ram or set it to 10000 if you have 256MB set it to 40000 if you have more than 512MB of ram -this tweak will speed up your disckcache Reboot and watch your system fly ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Open Explorer from Command Line in Same Directory If you are at the command prompt 10 subdirectories deep, simply do the following: explorer . will open an explorer window and it will be in that directory. explorer .. will open on directory back.... ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Swap File Tweak For Users with 256 MB RAM or more this tweak will boost their Windows- and Game-Performance. What it does: It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left. Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" under the 386enh section. Restart your Windows and enjoy better Game performance ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Clicking AVI Files on explorer casuing 100% CPU Usage Well windows seem to have a REALLY big problem when it comes to reading AVI files. It seems that when you click on an AVI file in explorer, it'll try to read the entire AVI file to determine the width,height, etc. of the AVI file (this is displayed in the Properties window). Now the problem with Windows is that if you have a broken/not fully downloaded AVI file that doesnt contain this info, Windows will scan the entire AVI file trying to figure out all these properties which in the process will probably cause 100% CPU usage and heavy memory usage. To solve this problem all you have to do is the following: 1. Open up regedit 2. Goto HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler 3. Delete the "Default" value which should be "{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}" Voila! Please not that this will no longer provide you with the windows properties displaying the AVI file information such as width, height, bitrate etc. But its a small price to pay for saving you resources. NOTE: Please use caution when using regedit. Improper usage may cause windows to behave imcorrectly. Also, I cannot be held resposible. Backup your registry first. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Clean your prefetch to improve performance This is an unique technique for WinXP. We know that it is necessary to wash registry and TEMP files for Win9X/ME/2000 periodly. Prefetch is a new and very useful technique in Windows XP. However, after using XP some time, the prefetch directory can get full of junk and obsolete links in the Prefetch catalog, which can slow down your computer notablely. My suggestion is: open C(system drive):/windows/prefetch, delete those junk and obsolete files,reboot. It is recommended that you do this every month. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Virtual Paging File This tweak can increase the amount of RAM significantly used on your computer. What this tweak actually does is it uses your hard-drive disk-space to emulate RAM. This is called caching, or in Microsoft terms - The Virtual Paging File Size. 1.) Go into Control Panel and into Performance and Maintenance 2.) Get into System 3.) Click the Advanced Tab 4.) In the Performance Frame, click on Settings 5.) Once in Settings click on the Advanced Tab 6.) Now under Virutal Memory click on Change 7.) Here you can set your RAM value. The recommended increase you should make should be achieved by multiplying your RAM by 1.5. This is already done if you have a System Managed file size. I like to increase it by 1/5 of my actual hard-drive space. This will drastically increase performance, because the system will now have a pool of cache to retrieve memory from. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Get more processing power. In the Run box, type "Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks". This frees up any idle tasks running in the background so that Windows XP can devote its full attention to what you want it to do. For example playing graphic intensive games. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Watch movies with 'AboveNormal' priority This tweak will launch WindowsMediaPlayer (or any program) with the 'AboveNormal' priority setting when opening a mediafile. Having trouble watching a movie when you also have a lot of background processes going on? Here's what to do: 1. Create a new textfile in the root of c:\, but instead of giving it the .txt extension you name it wmp_AboveNormal.bat 2. Right-click this file and choose 'Edit', you'll see it'll open notepad. Put this line in: start /AboveNormal C:\"Program Files"\"Windows Media Player"\wmplayer.exe %1 %* 3. Save (make sure you save it as .bat, not as .txt) and close. Now all you have to do is register your mediafiles to this batchfile. Here's how to do that: 4. In Windows Explorer choose Tools>Folder Options >File Types 5. Scroll down(press A) to the AVI filetype 6. Click 'Change' and point to c:\wmp_AboveNormal.bat . Click OK and Close. Now everytime you dubbleclick an .avi WMP will open with the 'AboveNormal' -priority setting ! (Repeat steps 4-6 to register all mediatypes you want to be opened this way.) These are all the settings: Realtime, High, AboveNormal, Normal, BelowNormal, Low. *Realtime is not recommended unless you have a dual-CPU system! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ SystemPages Memory Tweak By default, if you look in the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]key, you'll see the 'SystemPages' DWORD Value set to something around 500 MB (more accurately, 524288 (KB), or something close to that value). Simply reduce the value to something around 128 MB (131072 KB) or 256 MB (262144 KB). Personally, I'm using the 128 MB setting, since my total RAM is 256 MB. It might help to experiment a little, since each machine will most likely yield better or worse results. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Unload .dll's to Free Memory Windows Explorer caches DLLs (Dynamic-Link Libraries) in memory for a period of time after the application using them has been closed. This can be an inefficient use of memory. 1. Find the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]. 2. Create a new DWORD sub-key named 'AlwaysUnloadDLL' and set the default value to equal '1' to disable Windows caching the DLL in memory. 3. Restart Windows for the change to take effect. I tried this after running a intense program, then watched the task manager; memory recovered it self. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Remove hibernation file If you do not use hibernation, make sure you do not have it enabled, which reserves disk space equal to your RAM. If you have a hidden file on the root directory of your C-drive called hiberfil.sys, hibernation is enabled. To remove that file, go to Control Panel, select Performance and Maintenance, Power Options, Hibernate tab, and uncheck the Enable hibernation box. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Optimise NTFS NTFS is a great filesystem, but its feature-set comes at a slight cost in performance. You can negate this a little with the following tips: * By default NTFS will automatically update timestamps whenver a directory is traversed. This isn't a necessary feature, and it slows down large volumes. To disable automatic updating, change the value of the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry entry (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentContolSet\Control\Filesystem) to 1. If the entry is not already present in the registry, add it before setting the value. (Add it as a REG_DWORD) * NTFS uses disparate master file control tables to store filesystem information about your drives. Over time these core MFT files grow and become fragmented, slowing down all accesses to the drive. By setting aside a little space, MFT's can grow without becoming fragmented. In the same key where you disabled the last access feature creat a new DWORD value called 'NtfsMftZoneReservation' and set it to 2. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Turn off System Restore to save space By default, Windows XP keeps a backup of system files in the System Volume Information folder. This can eat up valuable space on your hard drive. If you don't want Windows to back up your system files: 1. Open the Control Panel 2. Double-click on system 3. Click the System Restore tab 4. Check "Turn off System Restore on all drives" 5. Hit Apply 6. You may now delete the System Volume Information folder. Warning! If you turn this off you will not be able to use Windows System Restore to restore your system in case of failure. |
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Copyright 2005 markbickford.com All Rights Reserved. |
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