Tips to Improve System perfomence

[suryad]

Boot XP Very Fast : by using Hibernation instead of shuting down

your PC will shut down also completely but will boot the next time

in a blazing speed...

give it a try and see what happen.

Exactly. I dont even remember the last time I had to boot my machine up...hibernate all the way. And I have been closely monitoring the RAM usage and contrary to popular belief, the memory usage goes up to a certain point...in my case around 250 mb and then just chills there. I think the longer you use your machine the longer the OS gathers information about most commonly executed tasks and so on....just information for it to run as smooth and as fast as is possible...and thats why the mem usage goes up but to a certain point. I remember when I installed Linux Suse 9.2 I believe on a workstaiton, it would use up almost all the RAM as much as it could when tasks were running so as to minimize access to the hdd which is I think what good OSes should do to speed up everything. The workstation had a gig of ram and with all the daemons and tasks running it would take up 900mb easy....

[Gagira]

You could also close all the unwanted background task like mesenger (if you not chatting), or closing virus and spyware detectors if you are noton the internet.

But Do not hibernate to speed up your windows boot time. It may speed up your boot time but you will find out that the computer will be slower than normal when working on programs.

Try it

[Zxian]

I believe, as always correct me if I'm wrong, a static pagefile in it's own partition (for single hard drive) gives the best performance. This I remember from BV, he did some tests running a video game.

Static pagefile - yes.

Own partition - no.

I went off on a little bit of a rant about it here.

For the most part, the performance gains you'll get from manually setting the pagefile aren't really all that noticable to the average user, but for those of us who use memory hungry apps (VMware, Photoshop, 7-zip, etc), it can help.

But Do not hibernate to speed up your windows boot time. It may speed up your boot time but you will find out that the computer will be slower than normal when working on programs.

I use hibernation all the time, and I haven't noticed any slowdowns from my computer as a result of it... Any reason for what you said?

[azagahl]

Own partition - no.

That glib answer is wrong, Zxian. Having a fixed swap file on its own partiton on a disk on an alternate IDE channel, when other partitions on that disk are seldom used, can certainly increase performance over having the OS and swapfile installed on a single hard disk. I recommend using a partition because it's the best way to control the filesystem overhead, size and location of the pagefile. FAT16 should be adequate as long filenames and NTFS overhead isn't required. FAT16 with 4 KB or larger clusters is best. The pagefile should ideally be located at the beginning (perimeter) of the disk.

Edited November 17, 2005 by azagahl

[Zxian]

glib? Not quite... I'll repeat myself once:

If you're going to tell people that they're wrong, you might as well back it up. And there is a point in agruing when the "tweak" that you've applied actually doesn't help performance at all.

Think about the typical scenario. Most computers do not have two hard drives. 99% of the computers that you find in retail stores or workstations at offices have 1 hard drive.

Given that scenario, there is no advantage to having the pagefile on a separate partition (it's detrimental actually).

If you have two or more hard drives on separate IDE channels, then you can get a benefit. However, I'd like to see some benchmarks to prove that FAT16 is the way to go, and also the whole 4KB clusters or larger bit as well. I've heard this around quite a bit, but never actually seen anyone back it up. Every site that you look at for NTFS vs. FAT gives the same general answer - NTFS is better than FAT. The only case where it wouldnt' hold is for smaller drives (<500MB).

[Nilfred]

Boot XP Very Fast : by using Hibernation instead of shuting down

your PC will shut down also completely but will boot the next time

in a blazing speed...

give it a try and see what happen.

Better make use of Suspend To Ram (STR) feature of newer* machines.

Suspend instead of Turn Off, the PC will instant go off and later will instant go on on power up.

In STR the PSU is off, but still supply power to RAM via 5VSB, so all your goods are safe unless a major power outage occur.

*Not so newer: I got a STR enabled ASUS A7N266-E from 2001.

STR requirements:

-STR enabled in BIOS.

-RAM configured by SPD. (Overclockers may get disappointed)

-PSU with at least 2A in 5VSB out.

-STR bug free processor (There are some well known **** buggy Atlhon XP)

-Optional UPS where power outages are common.

[ronin2040]

replying to Zxian: I believe that both the "seperate partition" thing and the "large cluster size" ideas are done as a way of fighting fragmentation. If you have a dynamic pagefile, and for some reason expect it to be read a LOT, its possible that it could fragment as it grows, correct?

As for the cluster sizes, it will combat fragmentation to some degree. Easiest way to put it is, a 64k file with 4k clusters could possibly be split into 16 fragments. on a 16k cluster size, at the expense of possible wasted space (possibly TONS of wasted space), there could be a maximum of 4 fragments.

In reality, I'm not sure how useful it is, but I like to use a 8k partition, just in case .

I also like to keep my pagefile on a seperate partition, but thats for a few different reasons--easy to manage rights to it, and the space can easily become usable for a linux swap-partition (or backup partition) upon need.

[Zxian]

@ronin2040 - It's usually pretty rare to have a really horribly fragmented pagefile. The pagefile isn't going to grow by 64K at time - it'll grow in several hundred MB at a time. Windows will look for the next possible contiguous free space to place the pagefile in and then reserve all that space for it.

I really don't think that you'd get any more fragmentation from a partition with 4K clusters vs 16K (or whatever). To take it one step further, those people who set the cluster sizes manually are probably also those who set the pagefile to a static size - so the whole argument of reducing fragmentation levels goes to moot.

The separate partiton argument makes no sense whatsoever. On the same hard drive, you're hurting your performance by placing the pagefile farther away from the system files. Whatever issues you would run into with fragmentation on your system drive, you'll have on your other partition as well.

[Andromeda43]

Since the early days of Windows, there are certain things that windows needs to do that it can only do during a normal boot up procedure. Leave a PC on all the time and it's not able to do its built in procedures.

In Windows 98 is was the ol' memory leak. Windows needed to reboot to flush ram and restore the registry.

XP is none the less dependent on periodic reboots.

Leaving an off the shelf PC run 24x7 robs the OS of its chance to flush and refresh itself.

And, the mechanical components like the cooling fans are not designed for a 100% duty cycle.

I always set my hard drives, for instance, to spin down after 15 min's of inactivity, to decrease the power draw and heat dissapation and to save the bearings.

SO, when you're done with it....Turn it OFF.

Good Luck,

Andromeda43

[Zxian]

Since the early days of Windows, there are certain things that windows needs to do that it can only do during a normal boot up procedure. Leave a PC on all the time and it's not able to do its built in procedures.

In Windows 98 is was the ol' memory leak. Windows needed to reboot to flush ram and restore the registry.

XP is none the less dependent on periodic reboots.

Leaving an off the shelf PC run 24x7 robs the OS of its chance to flush and refresh itself.

Certain things such as...what exactly? From my expereience, XP can run for days on end... Yes, in Windows 98 there were simply problems with memory management, but on the other hand XP can run for ages. I use my laptop throughout the day and I only put it into hibernation. The last time that I actually booted Windows was when I installed the Catalyst 6.1 drivers (i.e. mid last week). Ever since then, it's been just peachy.

And, the mechanical components like the cooling fans are not designed for a 100% duty cycle.

I always set my hard drives, for instance, to spin down after 15 min's of inactivity, to decrease the power draw and heat dissapation and to save the bearings.

SO, when you're done with it....Turn it OFF.

Good Luck,

Andromeda43

Fans are actually designed to be run all the time - especially computer fans. They're designed to run and run and run to make sure that your CPU doesn't overheat. It would be somewhat nearsighted for the engineer who designs the fans to only consider cases where the computer will be off.

Likewise with hard drives. From what I've read, most hard drives are rated for at least 20,000 hours of operation, if not more (I read up on this when I bought my old laptop hard drive). Proper cooling will help increase the life of your hard drive. A drive that runs at 45C 70% of the time will probably fail before a similar drive that runs at 30C all the time.

[nitroshift]

Boot XP Very Fast : by using Hibernation instead of shuting down

your PC will shut down also completely but will boot the next time

in a blazing speed...

give it a try and see what happen.

... and if you have a power fail, it will boot even faster NOT!...

[Angelico_Payne]

Ok first disabling services, u get a litlle more spped, but after disabling some network related services, you get hog ups, and freezes, like windows is waiting for those servieces to come online...

I too noticed hibernation is better, much much better, so how can make a tweak to hibernate everytime instead of shutdown?

[Angelico_Payne]

Boot XP Very Fast : by using Hibernation instead of shuting down

your PC will shut down also completely but will boot the next time

in a blazing speed...

give it a try and see what happen.

... and if you have a power fail, it will boot even faster NOT!...

Hibernation is like shutdown,but extended, so it accutaly turns off your computer...

What is a reg tweak to make hibernation primary instead of shutdown?

[doodr]

after a fresh install of windows xp i always do the following, if not done already by the install xp being customized itself

#1 - Update windows using windizupdate, reboot. (usually done by nlite)

#2 - Limiting startup and automatic services (usually done from nlite)

#3 - limiting programs and dll's that are opened/ran/loaded/registered on boot with autoruns from systeminternals

#4 - turning off all visual options and making sure these are on, commontasks, themes, font rendering, smooth scrolling and show window contents while dragging(partially done by nlite)

#5 - setting all drives to have 0 swapspace, turning off auto updates, turning off system restore, turning off the windows firewall, reboot, and defrag, then on all drives set the pagefile swapspace size equal to the largest stick of ram in the computer, rebooting twice. and im done

Edit: Note: usually i notice i have about 50 more megs of ram free'd when using a pagefile then when it is set to a size of 0, also when set to a size of 0 many 3d games fail to play properly.

Edited April 11, 2006 by doodr

[leedolman]

I've been using this for years now...

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

very handy