TURBO CHARGING
your Windows XP Operating System Part 1
Shutdown
on speed
By altering a few registry settings, you can dramatically decrease
the amount of time it takes for Windows to shut down. To do this,
first open up the registry editor and navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\
Once there, find the value HungAppTimeout
and make sure it is set to 5000 (that's the default). Now,
in the same folder, look for the value WaitToKillAppTimeout.
Set this to 4000 (the default is 20000).
Lastly, navigate to the folder
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\
and change the value WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 4000
as well. Another thing that helps speeding up shutting down is going
to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools ->
Services and then setting the NVidia Driver Help service
to Manual.
Setting
DMA Mode on IDE Drives
For some reason, Windows XP sometimes sets itself to use a PIO transfer
mode on IDE channels instead of the DMA mode. If this is the case,
you can manually set the IDE channel to DMA mode, which will reduce
the amount of CPU cycles being used on that device. To set this,
go to Device Manager (press Windows-Break, or right click
'My Computer' -> Properties, then go to the Hardware tab, then
finally click 'Device Manager'), then open up the branch labelled
'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers'. Now, double click on 'Primary
IDE Channel' and go to Advanced Settings.
and check the Transfer Mode scroll
boxes. Set them all to DMA If Available, then click OK. Continue
to do this for each IDE Controller, and you should be right.
The
XP Prefetcher
With Windows XP comes a service called the Prefetcher.
This service monitors which programs initialize when Windows boots,
then in future, fetches them quickly. The Prefetcher is enabled
by default, but you can improve its performance. Simply navigate
to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management\PrefetchParameters
in the registry and find the value EnablePrefetcher. Most
likely, it will be set to 3. The recommended setting for the
prefetcher is 5, and that's what works best for me. Feel free to
play around with it a bit, though, and find out what works best
for you.
It is possible to disable the Prefetcher by setting
the value to 0, but the only reasons you might want to do
this is if you wanted to test a machine in a lab environment.
ZIP
Folders
A really quick tweak... Windows XP has built-in support for .ZIP
files, so that you can view them as normal folders. However, the
system uses a sizeable portion of resources doing this, so disabling
this feature can increase performance. It's easy to do, you just
have to un-register the zipfldr.dll, by going to Start ->
Run... and typing
regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll
then pressing Enter.
Unloading DLLs
Explorer often caches DLL files in memory for a period of time after
they have finished being used. This can result in large amounts
of memory being taken up by DLL files that are not even being used.
To stop this happening, navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Now, you have to create a new sub-key called AlwaysUnloadDLL
with a default value of 1.
If you want to disable this tweak, just delete the key. Note: Windows
has to restart for this tweak to take effect.
Hibernation
Another really quick and easy tweak - if you're not going to be
using Hibernation (as most people don't), make sure it is disabled,
as Windows reserves an amount of Hard Drive space equal to that
of your RAM for hibernation. To disable Hibernation, go to Control
Panel -> Power Options -> Hibernate Tab.
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