Tuneup Tricks & Tips for Windows

Let's have a delightful little thread-o-letto, wherein the geekishly-inclined share their favorite tips on how to get that last smidge of speed out of a WindowsXP install.

Without overclocking the CPU to supernova states. That would be cheating.

I will be posting my tips, later. let's hear yours.

http://www.blackviper.com/

It's designed more for somewhat experienced users, but it is explained well enough for computer novices with at least some patience.

Also, I recommend a good benchmarking site:

http://www.pcpitstop.com

The site will scan your computer, and make recommendations for improving performance.

I went to the pcpitstop site and ran a test on my computer. WOW! You wont believe the huge difference it made to my system by following their suggestions. My husband is a senior software developer but it seems he has no patience when it comes to MY computer. haha

Why try to overclock when running that POS Windows??? Kinda like putting a Porsche engine into a Nova.

I run Linux. But I do work on Windows machines, as do many. Man, many others run Windows. This is for them.

Overclocking is for hardware, FSB, Memory, cpu, vid card, etc...

such a shitty OS.

but the OS has nothing to with the stability of the overclock. Whether you use Linux, MAC OS X or XP it doesn't matter. What matters is the quality of the BIOS, the hardware, the cooling, etc... ;)

It was a pretty badass car in the 60's.

this is an easy one. Create a second partition on your HDD, and move the pagefile from the partition that holds your system and boot partitions to the new partition. Better still, if you have a second HDD installed, move the pagefile there.

Open an instance of Windows Explorer, right click on My Computer, and select Properties. On the Advanced tab, click the Settings button in the Performance section. In the Performance Options window, select the Advanced tab, and then click the Change button in the Virtual Memory section. You will then highlight your C: drive, select the No paging file radio button located in the Paging file size for selected drive section. Click the Set button. Now you will highlight the drive you wish to locate the pagefile to. Select Custom size in the Paging file size for selected drive section, and enter the Initial size and the Maximum size for the new pagefile. Again, you will click the Set button.

A good rule to use is to set the minimum at 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM installed in your PC (for example, if you have 256 MB of physical RAM, you will set your minimum at 384), and the maximum to at least 3 times the amount of physical RAM (768 using the above example). To determine the amount of physical RAM installed in your PC, check the General tab in your System Properties.

I always move the pagefile to another drive, if there are two frives in the system. Even if it is a dual boot Windows/Linux machine(I make a 1 gig partition for the Windows swap file). I do, however, tend to leave the pagefile size dynamic.

Saves on head thrashing at startup. Makes it boot faster.

for 98 users.
http://9337387.home.icq.com/index.html

1) Make sure you have at least 512mb memory. Anything less is a major speed bottleneck, even with no programs running.

2) Eliminate any viruses or trojans on your machine, then add a LIGHT firewall like Kerio Personal Firewall and a lightwight anti-virus like F-prot. Remove any slug-ware like Zone Alarm or Norton AntiVirus that slow down your machine horribly without being any more effective than the faster smaller programs.

Turn off constant anti-virus scanning as well. If you keep your signatures up to date and scan weekly, there is no need to have the anti-virus software checking every single bit of data that your computer accesses.

Use Firefox and Thunderbird as web/mail clients to prevent your machine from getting re-infected by the Microsoft Virus Generator Suite, that is Outlook Express and Internet Exploder.

3) If you have a ton of junkware running in your system tray, remove everything from your system startup except the programs that you absolutely must have running all the time. For me this means just firewall/Trillian at startup, everything else can get its mits on my system when I need it to run, not until.