Speed up Windows XP? - I've tried everything - Page 3

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. Yo Joe!

Under the control panel, go to the System applet--you can also hold down the 'Windows' Key and press break to get there. Under the advanced tab, click the Settings button in the Performance panel. Once the Performance Options window opens, click the Advanced tab there. The Processor Scheduling and Memory Usage should be set for Programs (this is the default). In the Virtual Memory panel, click the change button. In the Paging file size for selected drive panel, click the System managed size radio button, and click the Set button. After you hit OK, it will warn you that a restart is required for this to take effect; you can if you want, or just wait until your next reboot. Like I said, this won't improve performance under normal use; it just acts as a safety net for Windows, allowing it to grab some more hard disk space for paging should it ever need.

Like kent said, a faster drive will make things more responsive if it still feels sluggish to you. Of course, it will come at the expense of battery life.

Crap, they removed deltree from 2k/xp?

Shows how long it's been since I needed to use it.

I miss the days when you could invoke commands through IRC...I actually got a few people to do that. hah

the best registry cleaner used by hardcore windows/overclocker guys is

jv16.org

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Use Hibernate instead of Shut Down to power down and you only have ?(insert RAM size here)? to reload instead of ?(insert number of processes, drivers and dlls here)? to load and configure. I usually only reboot when something radically changes, like a new program install or a run of regcleaner.

Each of those 56 processes have a bunch of .dlls. Run MS Sytem Information and check out how much stuff gets loaded...

Start > Run > msconfig.

click on the startup tab. You will see a list of most of the processes that load at boot. Many of them are unnecessary. Google them one at a time. The first or second result will usually tell you what the process does and if it is safe to disable it.

Uncheck anything that is not needed, click OK and reboot. If you have any doubts about a process, let me know.

you guys should have already turned off all visuals and sound effects.

These tweaks are relatively hidden


A. Control Panel>System>Advanced
Click the Settings button under Performance and under the Visual Effects tab select "Adjust for best performance" for fastest performance. You can also choose Custom and leaving "Use visual styles on windows and buttons" ticked so you retain XP's looks and interface customization. I prefer the "best performace" option myself.


B. Control Panel>Sounds and Audio Devices>sound
Disable as many system sounds as you can by selecting each Program Event>[None] from the Sounds list below. Alternatively, you can assign the same sound to several events. These various sounds sit in system memory and hence the less the better. In particular I recommend disabling sounds for Start Windows and Exit Windows to speed up booting and shutting down. Once done, Save these new settings by clicking "Save As..."

for laptops there should NOT be more than 32 processing at bootup, this includes all laptop propriatary drivers (for power, led light controllers, media play buttons etc)

get 1GB of ram, disable swap, that is the best thing you can do for your laptop to speed it up when loading apps etc

NEVER disable swap with XP!!!

Some programs look for a swap file even if you have more than enough RAM. It's never a good idea to completely disable the swap. Shrink it if you want gut don't get rid of it entirely.

Why do you say there shouldn't be more than 32 processes run at boot time? The number of processes listed in the Task Manager after a clean startup does not correlate with performance (in the sense of machine responsiveness). For most processes, once they've loaded, they require ZERO CPU cycles and their memory footprint is likewise negligible. If there's memory pressure, an inactive process is simply paged out until it's needed...which brings me to my next point: like others have said, don't disable the page file. Disabling the page file doesn't make programs load or run any faster. Disabling the page file can, under some circumstances, absolutely kill performance, though. Remember, just because you allow Windows to move things out of memory to the page file doesn't mean it will. Without a page file, when Windows has to evict a page from memory, it has no place to put it in case it's needed again soon.

Shrinking the amount of disk space available to Windows for paging doesn't provide any benefit under any circumstances, but can hurt performance in certain situations. Giving Windows 10 GB of disk space for paging will never have a negative impact on performance. Giving Windows too small a space for paging will bring your computer to a crawl when it hits that limit. The idea is to avoid this latter situation.

on SP2 i disabled, security center, sys restore, indexing, remote registry, etc and it spend it up pretty good

Do you have spyware detection software installed? And do you use it? viruses/spyware and stuff are the only things I could think of that would slow your computer down that much in 2 weeks.

Tellerve

Is it just Firefox that is slow, or do you have issues in other applications?