Maya Interface Speed

[Emmortal1]

First off, XP has a huge overhead for non used system processes and stupid graphics "features" that hog up resources. Take a visit over to http://www.tweakxp.com and run through some of the tweaks they have there for turning off unused system procesess and graphic features. I've been able to get my OS memory useage overhead to be running at around 110mbs which formally was at about 240mbs with no applications open. Hope that helps some.

P.S. Also tweaking out the System Page file can help performance a TON. I wrote up a tutorial over at 3dsurfer on optmizing system ram and Maya's renderer, but I'll cut/paste the applicable excerpt here for you:

System Memory Management

There are a few tweaks that you can do to your system to allow for better memory management. One major thing is controlling your system page file. By default, Windows will manage the pagefile that is on your computer. Basically what this does is it holds commonly accessed data in one large file so that when the system reaches it's limit it will begin to store data on your hard drive and swap that data out from the hard drive to your system ram as needed. Obviously, system disks are much slower than RAM thus a huge performance hit will incur. Windows does not manage this file appropriately so some manual settings should be applied. The biggest issue is setting the swap file to a set size. This causes the swap file to not grow to extremely large proportions causing even worse performance, telling it to stay one size causes Windows not to swap with an overly large file, this also will increase performance greatly. Telling it to set at one size will cause the swap file to flush unneeded data and replace it with current data needed for the computations. Having it open ended or allowing Windows to manage the file can cause a huge amount of performance to be lost. If you have a second hard drive, set the page file to no swap file on the C drive and then set it appropriately to your second hard drive. When data is accessed from the swap file and it resides on the same drive that Windows is running it's main access from, this will cause a major performance hit, the data has to swap directly to the same drive causing the drive to over access the platters going back and forth between sectors. Depending on your system RAM, you generally want to set the swap file to double your system memory. So if you have 512mbs of RAM, you will want to set the swap file to 1024 min 1024 max. I personally have mine set to 2048 min 2048 max, but I have a large amount of system ram, anything over 2048mbs for the swap file is unecessary. You can view/change your swap files by going to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced Tab -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Virutal Memory Change. Below is an image to illustrate:

http://www.3dsurfer.com/files/library/pagefile.gif

[pyromania]

The biggest speed improvments I've gotten, was by just disabling the entire theme engine all together. Then XP goes back to the standard windows UI, and dosn't load all the theme bloat with it.

To do this go to the Control Panel>>Administrative tools>>Services

Find the entry for the Theme service, double click it and Stop it. Then change the Startup type to Disabled. That will speed up the UI quite a bit.

If you have a lot of system ram, like greater than 512mb. Enabling a large system cache helps too.

To do that, go to the Performance options Emmortal1 showed above and change Programs to System Cache. This will reserve more memory for the windows UI, and make it more responsive.

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