Ten Windows XP Performance Tweaks - Performance Tuning
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Now that we've covered several manual tweaks you can do in Windows and a number of great maintenance utilities to keep your system clean and healthy, it's time to dig into that engine and add some extra horsepower to it. There are a number of ways to do this, but we're only going to talk about four specific tools: Erunt, RegCleaner, TuneXP by DriverHeaven and Microsoft's BootVis.
BootVis is a little known illegitimate child of Microsoft's that was meant to be used by system and software developers to identify problems with their programs and the Windows XP operating system when resuming from standby or hibernate and on cold boots. BootVis is a visualization and tracing program that provides a read out on what your system is loading and how long it takes to load that program during startup. It is not an official program of Windows XP and is not available for download from Microsoft's website. It does, however, include an optimization utility that will improve your system startup fractionally. Typical results are the reduction of load times by one to five seconds depending on the machine.
Erunt is a unique tool for backing up your registry, especially before you start to make changes to it. Once you've backed up the registry you can use the optimizer to boost the overall performance of your system. Once you've done that you can use RegCleaner to clean up old and unnecessary information in the registry. Often programs, especially a lot of freeware and shareware, do not uninstall properly and leave behind redundant information in the system registry. By using RegCleaner you can easily and efficiently clean up the registry and add a little more horsepower to the backbone of your Windows operating system.
TuneXP, on the other hand, is one of the crème de la crème of tuning programs out there. Currently it is in version 1.5 and is available for download from a number of online sources. TuneXP is considered to be one of the best and finest tuning tools available, and the best part is it's free!
TuneXP allows the user to the adjust their Memory and File Settings with such great abilities as Disabling the Paging Executive (for 512 MB of RAM or more), Faster Shutdowns, File Allocation Size Tweaks, and Improving NTFS Performance. Its greatest tool is the ability to rearrange your boot files by moving them to the edge of the drive and then defragmenting the drive. This can result in improving boot times by nearly 300%!!
There a number of other tweaks in the program, including the ability to increase your DNS cache to access network resources faster, increase the speed of USB polling and increase your CPU's priority for primary services over background functions. This program will also provide access to a little known tool from previous versions of Windows known as System File Checker (SFC) that will check your system to make sure your Windows files are valid.
Conclusion
Needless to say there are a number of ways and tools out there to improve the performance of your "dream machine" and to provide you with the satisfaction of knowing that your hardware is working as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Try some of these tweaks out and let's hear what you have to say about them.
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