optimizing windows xp
OPTIMIZING WINDOWS XP is xp the fastest version of windows ever thats debatable but this is not like every operating system that came before it its not as fast as it could be without a whole bunch of fine tuning windows operating systems are never streamlined by default part of the reason is that their install base is huge many times that of any other operating system in fact probably every other operating system combined no matter how well polished and optimized any windows OS may be Microsoft must balance performance with ease of use and cross the board compatibility therefore windows XP makes quite a few assumptions about how its going to be used its aesthetics are designed to give the GUI a warm friendly appearance but effects like drop shadows and fading menus slow the OS down ever so slightly failsafe tools like system restore can make recovering from crashes and incompatibilities easier but they eat up disk space and their quiet work in the background requires processor clock cycles windows xp also activates a whole batch of services that you may or may not need depending on how you use your computer streamlining your systems pool of processes can expedite the OS startup and save some clock cycles for foreground applications likewise common commercial software like quicken Microsoft office and others load their own background applications that eat up system memory and monopolize the processor if you spend a few minutes eliminating applets and services you dont need and are willing to sacrifice some of xps visual goodies you can noticeable improve game and application performance on an xp box xp itself even helps by optimizing its file system based on your computing habits and Microsoft provides a few hands on applets to speed up the optimization process many of the optimizations are presented here that will require registry editing or employing other system altering modifications you ll need administrative privileges on the machine in question before proceeding you should disable any antivirus and security programs you may be using and make backups of critical data onto removable media windows xp is highly customizable Microsoft took care to make a great deal of its tweaks easily accessible to users of any experience level experimenting with them and getting your hands dirty is the best way to find your personal sweet spot in the mix of eye candy and system performace WINDOWS XPs BUILT IN OPTIMIZATION of everything you can do to optimize windows xp one of the simplest is just to use it as you launch and exploit applications windows observes your behavior and updates a dynamic file called layout. ... after every three days whit it senses that the computer is idle it rearranges the locations of programs on the system hard drive to optimize their launch and execution xp also speed up and the boot process and optimizes the launch of programs by using prefetching windows observe the code and programs that are used immediately upon boot up and creates a list of data to pre fetch very early in the boot process similarly as individual programs are launched windows keeps track of different files and components are accessed the next time the application is accessed windows pre getches the necessary items to expedite the applications launch the pre getch optimizing code exists both within the xp kernel and the task scheduler service the kernel keeps track of pages that are referenced by a given process immediately after the process is created the service transforms the recorded page into pre fetch instructions for that process the next time the process is created the kernel executes the pre fetch instructions speeding up the creation of the process disk optimization and application boot pre fetching work in tandem that is when xp optimizes file system for faster program access the data it recorded for the application and boot up pre fetch processes is factored in to determine optimal file placement on the disks EYE CANDY TWEAKING ICONS AND WALLPAPER a tidy desktop is an efficient desktop your systems memory and CPU have better things to do that to with pretty back grounds and sort out eighty five desktop icons as is the case with previous versions of windows excessive desktop icons and desktop wallpaper take up their share of system memory and these are constantly refreshed but the graphics subsystems animated desktops are particularly hard on systems core resources on the other hand the performance hit leveraged by such minor glitter is minimal so as long as your system has more than 128MB of RAM and a semi modern processor something in the range of 1.