Tips for improving Windows XP performance.

XMEN Iceman · Post by **XMEN Iceman** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 8:16 am

How to Tweak the Registry to Improve XP Performance Thanks to Roy for the following registry edits. As always, be sure to back up the registry before making changes. You should have at least 256MB of RAM before you make these changes. Open your favorite registry editor and navigate to the following key: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management DisablePagingExecutive - Double click it and in the decimal value field, put a 1. This will allow XP to keep data in memory instead of paging sections of RAM to the hard drive. LargeSystemCache - Double click it and change the decimal value to 1. This will allow the XP Kernel to Run in memory. Create a new DWORD value and name it IOPageLockLimit - Double click it and set the value in hex to 4000 if you have 128MB of RAM, 10000 if you have 256MB or 40000 if you have more than 512MB of RAM. Reboot and you should notice that your system runs faster. Another Trick for Speeding up Downloads Thanks to Jamie for the following tip to increase download performance Log on as Administrator. Click Start | Run and type gpedit.msc to open the Group Policy Editor. In the left pane, under Computer Configuration, click Administrative Templates, then Network, then QoS Packet Scheduler. In the right pane, double click "Limit reservable bandwidth." On the Setting tab, select Enabled and set the bandwidth limit to 0%. Click OK and reboot the computer. Note that this only works with XP Pro, not with XP Home. How to Save your IE Favorites H.G. wrote, asking how to save his IE Favorites so that if his computer crashes, he won't have to look them all up again. Here's how (with IE 5.x or 6.x): Within Internet Explorer click File and select "Import and Export...". On the first page of the Import and Export Wizard, click Next. Click "Export Favorites" and click Next. To back up all favorites, leave the Favorites folder highlighted, and click Next. If you want to back up only certain folders in your favorites, you can select them. Under "Export to a file or address," select the destination to which you wish to save your favorites and click Next. This can be on a hard disk on your computer, on a network drive, or on a removable disk. Even with a lot of favorites, this file is usually small enough to put on a floppy disk. Click Finish. You should get a dialog box that says "Successfully exported favorites" when the file copy is finished. Now if you need to import the favorites back into IE on another machine, or on the same one after you've reformatted and reinstalled the OS, just open IE, open the Import and Export wizard again, and this time, select "Import Favorites" and follow the steps. By default, the file name when you save your favorites is bookmark.htm. You can navigate to this file where you saved it and open it in your browser. You'll see links to all your favorites, categorized by folders. How to Remove Unnecessary Programs from Startup Thanks to T.B. for reminding us that another thing that can slow down XP is having two many programs running in the background. Take a look in the notification area (Microsoft's term in XP for what we used to call the system tray) after you boot and notice all the icons there that represent programs that launch at startup. There are a couple of ways to stop programs from loading at startup. In Windows Explorer, go to Documents and Settings on the partition where Windows is installed, click the folder with your user name, click Start Menu, then Programs, then Startup. This will show programs specific to your account that start when you boot. Then go to the All Users folder, Start Menu, Programs, Startup to see programs that start at boot time for all users. You can right click to delete the shortcuts, which will prevent the program from starting at startup. These are only shortcuts and will not delete the programs themselves. Another way is to click Start, Run and type msconfig. Click the Startup tab and you can view programs that are set in the Registry to run at startup. You can uncheck the checkbox for each program that you want to prevent from launching at startup. <table border=0><tr><td><embed align=left src=http://www.thzclan.com/avatars/ezice.swf menu=false quality=high bgcolor=#000000 width=217 height=166 type=application/x-shockwave-flash pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/dow ... <td><table border=0 style='Filter: Shadow(Color=#BB1403,Direction=255)'><tr><td>XMEN Iceman [DTM] Founder and Leader of the Base Tribes XMEN Clan Proud member of the Dragon Talon Mercenaries teamplayers Guild Citizen of New Fenecia You weren't much of a challenge - T2 bot after killing Iceman - click on avatar for links - no, not sausage links!</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>