How does one disable the event log for win2K?

[DaForce]

why would you bother disabling it?

all it does it make an entry every so often, it would take up basically no system resources and is actually very handy.

[singularity2006]

heh, I've never really used it ever. And on top of that, I want to try everything I can to improve system performance on this trashy old machine, no matter how marginal. =) It's kind of like doing the unusual thing of removing all the chairs from an old Civic, the a/c unit, spare tire, and all that other good stuff... marginal performance :)

[DaForce]

hehehe nice comparison. Also try setting your swap file to 1.5 times your ram and also set the min and max size to be the same size. That will improve performance.

And in windows explorer, turn off all the web view stuff (the thing that shows movies and pictures in that little side bar thingy. Makes a big difference.

[singularity2006]

ah yeah, i totally turn off all special effects in windows... stupid active desktop and web stuff. But yeah, pagefile size has always been something I've wondered about.... Alrighty, I'll mess around w/ that. But I did do a bunch of registry modifications that reduces the use of the pagefile anyway (and keeps more stuff in RAM), so would increasing RAM size make a diff?

Oh btw, for some more detailed specs:

Fujitsu C Series Lifebook 4230 (i think it's a 4230)
450MHz AMD K6-2 Processor
192MB of RAM
6GB HD
Onboard Trident Video Card
24x CD ROM that is loud like crazy
built in floppy
a battery that holds on 30min of charge

oh yeah, I've already disabled all non essential ports including all com ports: no serial, no parallel, no IR. I've done so much lol... anyhow, anything else?

[DaForce]

Keeping things in ram is always better as it is much much faster than accessing the swap file, i see you have 192mb thats a decent amount of ram for that type of machine. I dont think i would waste the money on buying more ram for it.

Hmm ohter little things like dont have a big assed high res wallpaper on your desktop, because each time you minimize a window your computer will bog down trying to redraw the wallpaper, try to stick with just simple colors.

A good tick for IE, never set the temporary internet files more than 50mb, try to use maybe even 20mb. The annoying thing now days is IE's default is not in mb its in percentage of disk space. So with all the new computers coming out with 80+gb drives the default Temporary Internet files size is usually over 1GB!!! Try and clear those temporary internet files, you will be at it for awhile.

also make sure you disable the messenger service (if you havnt already) this is the one that allows people to send you popup messages thru the command prompt i.e. net send computername hahahahaha

Dont set any problem to startup when windows starts up, this is just stupid, only have the stuff that you really need. i.e. battery idicators and stuff like that, NO icq msn kazaa or anything else. Just adds to the load time and 80% you dont even use the programs.

Thats all i can think of at the moment. Hope it helps, and doesnt confuse to much.

p.s. 30mins for the battery thats pretty crap, why dont you buy a new battery? or do you always run it of the mains anyway?

[singularity2006]

yup, I've done basically just about all u've said there. Lol, something got screwed up though and the system won't let me install systemworks. However, just NAV 2004 standalone works fine... strange as heck. Oh well.

as for the battery, it doesn't matter. A replacement is like 90 bucks ... no way I'm gonna spend that for a battery. It's always plugged in anyway. Virtual desktop basically. ^.^ I even have a computer desk with keyboard drawer and mouse for that thing.

As for internet cache, it's always set to 1MB. I'm on DSL so it doesn't take very long to re-load a page anyway. Anyhow, I was reading stuff about disabling Dr. Watson... does that do anything?

[DaForce]

yeah it **very very rarely** pops up when a program crashes and tells you what the error message is.

Get rid of it :-)

[singularity2006]

oooh yeah, how does setting application priority work? How can I use that to make my system overall, more responsive and such?

[DaForce]

application prority manages how the computer shares its resources between the open programs. For instance if you have programs open and both of them have equal priority then they will be allotted equal amounts of resources when required. Where as if you say give you 3d program low priority and your email program high priority, when your email prog goes to check your email it will take all the resources it needs even taking some from the 3d app if needed.

At least thats how i believe it all works.

It doesnt really make much difference (if any) if you only ever have 1 application going, it will however make a big difference if you have more than 1 app going at once.

[GregHess]

Though it would be a pain....

If you really wanted performance on the laptop...you could always put Windows NT4 on there :).

On older machines, Nt4 flies.

[DaForce]

yeah but NT4 is pretty average :-)

You would speed just as much time getting all the service packs and stuff on NT4 just to make it half decent as you would making Win2k run better on the laptop.

[singularity2006]

heh, i donated NT4 to the city dump a loooong time ago..... though it was a really nice OS! I was very reluctant to switch to 2K back in the day. But the bad part is that I would have absolutely no USB support... and I need that badly for my wireless NIC and mobile HD.

In anycase, the bootup still sucks like a mofo. It takes about 2min now to boot, which is about breaking even to my original standard. However, when things are done loading, applications seem to work pretty zippy.... the only weird thing is whenever I bring up the browse folders window, the thing takes a while to come up.

[DaForce]

what made the loading times shoot back up??

[singularity2006]

Norton Antivirus..... *sigh* But that's kind of a necessary evil since I do take my laptop online and such.

but oh well... the system overall seems to function a bit more responsively nevertheless..... boot just sucks. Actually, if the boot worked faster, I might actually be tempted to buy a new battery for the thing and take it out for a spin. In anycase, people keep recommending bootviz, but M$oft keeps saying it won't help improve boot performance, only detects boot errors... or something of the like. So what's the dealy w/ that program? Is it worth my time?:shrug:

[DaForce]

norton hey....bleeech...really slows things down.

I cant comment on that program as i have never used it, sorry.

[singularity2006]

yeah, norton really murdered it. I'm trying to figure out if I can safely disable any of the stuff it put into the startup but I'm very reluctant to do so..... when I have time, I'll screen shot and show you what I still have on the services and maybe u can show me which ones I might be better off turning off. Anyhow, I'm recording some of the more major tweaks I've done to the system in this thread here:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=96908

[DaForce]

You can disable most of the norton startup stuff from with norton i believe.


Yeah sure post your services and i will have a look for u :-)

Yep i have been keeping an eye on that thread.

[singularity2006]

Since this thing can't handle photoshop or any other photo editing app for that matter, I'll just have to type up the services that I have still enabled on auto:

COM+ Event System
Computer Browser
Event Log
Network Connections
NAV Auto Protect Service
Plug&Play
Print Spooler
Protected Storage
Remote Access Connection Manager
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Removable Storage
SAVScan (I have no freaking clue what this is... I think this came w/ NAV)
ScriptBlocking Service (yeah, I definitely wanna keep this one cuz I once every while hit a page w/ some malicious script)
Server
(the ones I was thinking of disabling are as follows:)
Symantec Core LC (this says "core" but I wonder how "core" it is to keep NAV running)
Symantec Event Manager (I always thought this was necessary to tell NAV to react if some virus hits)
Symantec Settings Manager (I dunno about this one)
(end of those)
Telephony
Windows Management Instrumentation
Windows Management Instrumentation Driver Extensions

Everything is on manual or disabled. Ideas?

And I was skimming some other articles about setting process priority in the task manager but I couldn't find any articles that were specific about setting process priority for system performance. So yeah, high, normal, low? Any input on that? Anyhow, I found an app that specifically defrags the pagefile... kind of interesting, and damn small!! the file is only 100K! Anyhow, resetting and letting it do its thing now....

and thanks DaForce for ur input! :thumbsup: :beer:

[singularity2006]

ah, stupid pagefile defragger says it doesn't have enough free space to defrag.... lol, how much space does it need?! I have 600MB free on C... hahaha. 2.5GB allocated, 1GB to windows, 1GB to apps and junk and the change to the pagefile. In anycase, my pagefile is shown to be 25% fragmented, which statistically speaking is unacceptable. In anycase, I was looking @ this vbscript that physically dumps the pagefile on demand.... you think that's something worth doing?

[DaForce]

those services look fine, i wouldnt cut it down anymore. Dont touch the norton stuff, as you will find your email might stop working...norton is ULTRA picky.

As for the page file, if you set the min & max sizes to be the same you would have to worry about it being fragmented.

There is no need for any fancy scripts to manage the pagefile, just set the min and max to 1.5 - 2 times the size of your ram.

No worries, glad i could help :-)

[singularity2006]

ah, sounds good. So the next question would be how setting process priority might help w/ system performance? In total, I have about 22 processes running @ any given time on the laptop but some just look a bit strange in how their process priority is set. Any ideas about how to fine tune that? Real-time on any is out of the question of course, but how do I qualify each one to see whether or not it should be low, normal, high? For the most part, the only services I have to work w/ are the ones in the services list I posted previously. And if I'm running apps, throw a few more, but those I already have tweaked around w/ pretty safely for performance. But the rest that are built in services?

[DaForce]

Ok, i dont think changing the priority will make much of a difference if any, but here is how i think things should work. You need to set things based on the importance, so ask your self if a certain program runs does it need as much resources as it can get its hands on, if so choose high priority, if its a program that can just putter away in the back ground set it to low. Now, at the same time it also up to what you want. If you want ot use something and dont wanna wait around set it to High. Im pretty sure thats who it all works, so try it out and see how it goes. If it ends up running like shiznat just set everything back to normal.

[singularity2006]

ah, I am running into a slight problem. Whenever I try to change the process priority, I keep getting an Access Denied error. Any ideas on how to force the settings?

[DaForce]

hmmm i dont think you will be able to if its saying access denied.


Best to leave well enough alone me thinks :-)

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