Win2K Marginal (or not) Performance Tweaks for You Folks

[singularity2006]

In addition to the above tweaks, there are a few third party applications that I use to cut the system down to size as well as maintain it. This software package is small and has been keeping my system running clean for quite some time now.

LitePC @ www.litepc.com (http://www.litepc.com/)
LitePC comes in two forms: XPLite and 2000Lite. After a clean format and application of all the registry modifications mentioned in this guide, run this program to start removing programs you know you will not use. This program lets users cut down Windows down to a bare OS with practically no applications to speak of. This allows companies to shrink down the OS with a certain application into flash memory that is often used in POS systems and other retail or industrial solutions. This program does have some drawbacks as some users may be tempted to remove items that they might actually need. For more, please visit the LitePC website @ http://ww.litepc.com/ for a trial download and more information.

nLite @ www.nliteos.com (http://www.nliteos.com)
nLiteOS is a great application for guys like me that do a lot of tweaking frequently. What it does is that it allows you to integrate your service packs, hotfixes, and tweaks and burn them into a bootable install CD. Then when you do an install of Windows, all the tweaks and everything come preloaded. Works GREAT. Oh, and it's free too!

Registry Mechanic @ www.winguides.com (http://www.winguides.com/)
Registry Mechanic is one of the most heavily marketed registry cleaning utilities on the market next to Symantec solutions. I normally run Registry Mechanic only once, which is after cutting the OS down using LitePC. The purpose of Registry Mechanic is to remove orphaned or invalid registry entries created by LitePC. Although LitePC does a GREAT drop at cutting down on system services installed, it does a poor job at clearing up the registry after it is done. Removing invalid registry entries can help improve system performance or in the least, prevent errors caused when applications look toward the registry for information that is not available or invalid. Winguides currently offers a series of system maintenance utilities, but being a person looking for the simplest and smallest solutions, Registry Mechanic as a standalone application works best compared with all their other available applications.

Diskeeper @ www.execsoft.com (http://www.execsoft.com/)
Although the partition setup described in this guide helps prevent and reduce the recurrence of disk fragmentation, fragmentation itself is not completely avoidable. It happens because of Windows updates, the installation of new applications, or drivers. Diskeeper is an industrial grade disk defragmenter used in servers and workstations. Windows actually uses portions of Diskeeper as a basis for defragmentation. The nice thing about Diskeeper is that it can be set to run automatically in the background when your system is not doing any heavy processing. With it set to run automatically, it helps reduce overall fragmentation, which also means shorter run times if it does run. This is a must have to keep disk performance optimized.

Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus @ www.grisoft.com (http://www.grisoft.com/)
My largest problems with poor boot times and unbearably high system resource consumption came from Symantec products including Norton Antivirus, which literally doubled the amount of system resources being consumed. Its high price only added insult to injury. Searching long and hard, CGTalk members recommended Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus, which is probably the lightest and most effective antivirus you can get for your money, which is $0! YES, it IS FREE! It also comes with auto-updates and is a solid performer. For other recommendations, please do a search for “antivirus” in the technical and hardware forum.

OnTrack Data Recovery's Easy Recovery Pro @ www.ontrack.com (http://www.ontrack.com/)
For anyone interested in a solid data recovery application and can afford it, OnTrack's "Easy Recovery Pro" is definitely the way to go. For any person who does serious computing and has their life's value on their systems, having EasyRecovery Pro in combination with a hot swappable drive (for quick backup and replacement and convenience) is a great alternative to physical data recovery services (also provided by OnTrack), which cost several times more than the software itself. And as an anecdote, all data recovery applications require data to be recovered to a separate drive or partition. In cases where you are able to recover data, having partitions is a convenient way to quickly recover data (especially if it's greater than what your removable media can handle) without having to physically connect a new drive. All in all, this is recovery software developed by an actual recovery company - cannot go wrong here.

Regarding Anti-Spyware/Adware & Protecting Yourself
I personally believe anyone that needs to rely on this type of software has too risky of an online surfing life or is too paranoid about it. The major three search engines today (Google, Yahoo, Ask) all sort results based on relevance to help remove fluff, which should help prevent infection from malicious sites (I only have a handful of sites I view regularly and know they are totally safe). I have not had any luck finding any applications that run as light as AVG AntiVirus (although they do have their own anti-spyware application available now that I have yet to try) that do the job. I do not use these apps as they are memory hogs and take up processing power unnecessarily. The majority of the most malicious applications use ActiveX, which is a core component of MicrosoftUpdate. If you are wary of these, disable ActiveX support in IE or switch to a browser that does not have any ActiveX support such as Firefox. At the time of this writing, IE7 and Firefox 2.0 both claim enhanced adware/spyware protection features, which make them compelling alternatives to actually installing these other 3rd party apps. And for added measure, some routers actually have their own built in functions for blocking ActiveX, Java, and other self-executables. These are all worth trying out. And if for some reason you do get infected, manually removing spyware (instructions always available somewhere online if you can identify the symptoms) is the best way to go if you want to preserve system resource use. If your computer is infected with several simultaneously, it is best to just format the system as the damage done is likely to be extensive and not worth repairing.

General Comments Regarding Software, Startup, and Unnecessary Fluff
One of the biggest problems I see on every single computer I work on is that users fail to take the time to look at the programs they are installing, how they install, and how they startup. Applications such as RealPlayer, Quicktime, Sun Java, Logitech devices, and so on all have some degree of startup load. If you install software, take the time to look through the preference, see where temp folders are, see if they auto-update, and see if they auto-load. There are so many computers out there being bogged down by the tremendous loads of junk that get installed over time and it is always because of this that people simply overlook the subtle to blame the obvious, "my computer is too old and slow - let's blow off $1K to buy a new one." Do not fall into this trap! Right now, just load up registry editor: start menu > run > "regedit" [enter]. Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (also look under HKEY_CURRENT_USER and DEFAULT_USER) and just take a look at the obscene amount of stuff autoloading itself on startup. Properly understanding your software needs and taking out the unnecessary fluff can go a long way to radically reducing your system's boot time. And hey, I know a lot of people that go through program preferences to say, "oh dang, this program can do that too?" You will be surprised at how much software you can do without and how much you save. Oh, and also be wary of applications that install other apps as bundles as trialware. Watch before you leap, read before you click. Software packages are like a box of chocolate - you never know what you're gonna get.

[singularity2006]

Heat is a deadly enemy to your system components and is only second to metal particles in dust that collect in computer chassis today. Most generic computer cases only have a PSU as a ventillation duct or the PSU and one or two fans in the rear.

The Physics of Heat
I am not a physics major but can at least say that heat rises and builds up in the upper portions of the case as well as any pockets that may trap it at the bottom of middle of the case. The goal of good ventillation is to bring air in through the front side of the case, through it to cool components, and out with the hot air through the rear and top of the case. Where possible, use high quality double bearing fans to bring air through the front of the case and through the back of the case. Most if not all chassis fans have arrows depicting airflow to let builders know how to orient the fans. So the rule for air flow: front to back and bottom up.

Cabling and Air Pockets
One major problem for older systems is the use of PATA IDE cable ribbons, which are wide and form pockets in the case. To prevent these cables from inadvertently causing heat pockets, eliminate them and replace them with rounded IDE cables or SATA cables where possible. Using these and a few wire ties, bundle them up into long bundles that can be laid down over various parts of the case frame so that it does not block air flow. There are also PSU's with modular power cables, which allow builders to only use what they need without the extra baggage hanging around blocking airflow. However, if your PSU has a lot of excess baggage, see if your case has some extra space between the PSU and the side panel of the case to hide some of these extra wires. And in addition to wires is also the PCI cards used in a system. These cards often form heat pockets that can be harmful to your components. Zalman has an interesting fan setup that allows you to mount an 80mm fan directly over all of your PCI cards to keep air flow going. If this does not fit your case (some cases will not fit this), the best place to use a PCI slot fan is next to your video card, which is the next largest heat producer next to the CPU and hard drives. The goal: bundle cables into long bundles that can be snaked around the case to prevent air blockages over chassis fans.

Thermal Grease
Most if not all heatsink-fans (HSF's) come with thermal paste or grease of some sort or at worse, a thermal pad. The CPU is the core of a computer and without proper heat regulation, this brain could fry in two seconds. The goal of HSF's are to transfer heat from the CPU to the heat sink through conduction and then dissipate that heat through convection with the fan. This is well and good except for the issue of conduction. Although manufacturing processes using six-sigma and other ISO controls produce great heat sinks, they are by nature not perfect. There are micro-ridges and imperfections that prevent the heat sink from making perfect contact with the CPU die. As a result, heat may not be conducting as efficiently as it should. To address this, manufacturers developed thermal paste or grease to fill these micro-imperfections to produce 100% contact between the CPU die and the heat sink. One misconception is that more is better. Completely false. Many builders who use too much thermal compound can end up creating heat feedback loops. Normally, the compound should create contact between the die and the heat sink. However, it is possible for the compound to spread over the die and spill over onto the silicon of the chip itself, which means as heat goes through the die and through the compound, can transfer back into the CPU, which causes greater heat issues. When applying thermal compounds, use only a paper thin layer!

In addition to thermal compounds, there are two types to take note of: paste and grease. Thermal paste is the white gooey stuff that normally comes with HSF's. However, more expensive and thermally conductive greases are also available. It has been said in some instances that greases void the warranty on CPU's. I am not aware if these rules have changed, but please be aware of that fact. Although in the least, I have never shorted any CPU's using grease.

For rounded cables and grease:

www.newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com/)
www.ebay.com (http://www.ebay.com/)
Arctic Silver 6 is a good compound to use if you can afford it. Lastly, avoid Arctic Silver Ceramique - that stuff is like toothpaste and HARD to work with. AS6 (are they on 7 yet?) works great and has the highest thermal conductivity available that I know of.

Oh, a note on water cooling: it's not worth it unless you are overclocking and cannot stand the noise from fans. Otherwise, it performs no better than air cooling in terms of conductivity/$.

[singularity2006]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/case.jpg

Front View
This is the front of my Cooler Master Praetorian case. I have aluminum Cooler Master bezels for my CDRW and DVDRW as well as special hot swap drives, one SATA, one PATA with LCD status monitors. These hot swap bays also have intake fans to take air in and cool the case. The bottom mesh grille has 2 80mm fans taking air in.



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0001-1.jpg

Case: Front Angle
This is a front angle of my case. The bottom half of the case consists of 2 80mm fans sucking air in through a mesh grille with a foam air filter behind it. These filters are great to have but get dirty quick and should be dusted every few months. Opening them up will help bring airflow when necessary.




http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0002.jpg

Cable Bundling
Notice the way the IDE and power cables are wrapped around each other into a bundle. This is not always the best route to go! However, because of my case size, it is hard to snake the cables around the case unless I had super long cables. But in anycase, my hot swap drives blow air directly past these cables so they do not impinge on airflow. However, one good thing about bundling your cables is that it clears up the space around your motherboard - especially zones around your north and south bridges, which can overheat if they are smothered in cables. This will lead to system instability and crashes if either of these bridges over heats. For added measure, I actually replaced my northbridge HSF with a more robust copper HSF (old one was aluminum) and added copper heat sinks to my southbridge (the nort bridge handles more traffic and generally heats up faster than the south). And for reference, the north bridge is located under the small copper HSF immediately under the massive Zalman I have over the CPU.




http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0008.jpg

Hidden Space for Cables
For builders with really large case and long cables, the back panel of the case is a great spot to bunch your wires. This removes them from airflow over the motherboard and its associated parts.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0004.jpg

Top Blower
Notice the pathway made for the top blower. This ensures that hot air can rise and escape without being impinged by cables. This spot is a tough one in that not all computers have top blowers. In this case, you need to ensure that cables do not block your PSU as the ventillation grille of the PSU in that section of the case is the only pathway for hot air to pass through.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0009.jpg

Hiding Cables Behind the PSU
I actually have a modular PSU setup so do not need to clean those up much. However, for those of you with PSU's with built in cables, bundling them up and placing them on the side of the PSU like shown here is a great idea - assuming you are not covering any ventillation grilles.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0010.jpg

Snaking SATA & Peripheral Cables
In my case, I have sufficient cable lengths that allow me to snake my SATA and USB cables behind the hard drive mounting rack and then onto the motherboard directly. Nothing hangs and the air pathway is free. Recall that this portion of the case has an air in take pulling air over the motherboard at this point.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/singularity2006/IMG_0007.jpg

PCI Slot Fan & Rear Blower
The rear of my case has several air blowing elements including the CPU, northbridge HSF, rear blower, and video card HSF. Even if you have a great HSF for your CPU, if you cannot get the hot air OUT of the case, it will just hover around that area of the case circling about giving you higher ambient temperatures. Having an air intake and outake is key to keeping good temperatures. For people with standard video cards, I recommend putting a PCI slot fan in the place where my video card is blowing air.

Airflow in this Case
For my system, I have the two 80mm fans taking air in through the front over my hard drive and into the case. From there, air is circulated by the CPU's HSF and the northbridge fans. Aside from that, the actual removal of air comes from my video card, which sucks hot air out through a PCI slot grille. The rear 80mm fan sucks out air from the CPU's HSF. The remaining hot air moves upward where it is taken out by the PSU and the top 80mm blower fan. Everyone's case is different but always remember that hot air rises and without proper intakes and outakes to get cool air moving in and out of the case, having the largest HSF for your CPU will NOT make a difference. And always, having all the best fans in the best place in the world make no difference if your cables block all the way. Keep those cables organized! With the advent of modular cables for PSU's and SATA versions of all of today's most popular peripherals and optical drives, there is no excuse to have poor wiring.

And just a side note: NO, it is not worth it to remove your side panels as this will increase volume of space your 80mm fans are supposed to work in. Keep your panels on and air will flow properly as the case was designed.

Some Recommended Hardware from Newegg.com

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835186114
Video Card Fans: There are various models for different cards
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010110573&Submit=ENE&Subcategory=573&Description=PCI+Fan&Ntk=all
PCI (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010110573&Submit=ENE&Subcategory=573&Description=PCI+Fan&Ntk=allPCI) Slot Fans
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010110572&Submit=ENE&Subcategory=572&Description=Vantec+north+bridge&Ntk=all
Chipset fans
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010010317&Submit=ENE&Subcategory=317&Description=round+cables&Ntk=all
Rounded cables of all sorts
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835118204
Zalman PCI fan - mounts OVER existing PCI cards and is GREAT for getting stagnant air moving.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817103941
Antec NeoPower PSU with modular cables

[yinako]

heres a suggestion, instal winXP.
I have been using win2k for long time until a friend convenced me to change it, and there was a big speed boost, xp start 3 times faster and GUI are more responsive. Never looked back.

[singularity2006]

yeah, tried that. My laptop lagged a million times more than it did w/ Win2K, even after applying all the tweaks and cutting out all of the bells and whistles..... it was so bad that when I tried typing, there was actually a text display output lag. WinXP resource management doesn't cut it w/ the system specs that I was using. Actually, what I did notice was that the built in system tuner helped the system boot just slightly better than Win2K, but when the whole OS was loaded, the performance was shot. I formatted the thing three times w/ XP and tried all sorts of diff file systems, since NTFS has a bit more overhead than FAT32 on small drives... this one is only 6GB.... but yeah, WinXP runs decent iff you have enough system resources to use it. Win2K does a bit better in terms of minimal amounts of hardware power, which is basically the !@#$ on this laptop I'm messing w/. Though in the least, it's pretty fun to mod the thing. :thumbsup: I haven't done any serious modding since my old Thunderbird 1.2.... now that was fun... hahaha. I miss my turbo button on the old school x86's. =)

<---edit--->
Let me edit that. Actually, WinXP ran pretty well until I installed anything from Norton. After that, the whole OS turned to sludge on me and lagged like crazy. After an uninstall, there was resident junk everywhere, so it was still sludge. I need my Norton products so I'll stick w/ 2K. But thinking back, just installing all my other stuff on WinXP (winamp, MS office, IE6, patches and such, MS Viz Studio(this gave the greatest performance drop.)), after performing all the registry and system tweaks, gave a performance hit that was noticable. WinXP worked great w/ the tweaks only up to the point when I began installing software basically. Oh yeah, this was WinXP Pro I was using.

[singularity2006]

Believe it or not, I have yet to sell this laptop I originally tweaked out. ACtually, I upgraded the lil bastid to a 7200RPM hard drive which made all the difference in the world. The jump from 4200 to 7200 has made things so radically different it's not even funny... haha. And that's the thing that a lot of people don't realize - the bottleneck between components. You may have the fastest components all over the place but if u have one bottleneck, it'll ruin everything. In this case, it was the hard drive. I had already maxed out RAM on this notebook to 192MB and the CPU is 450, more than enough to run the desktops that I've installed Win2K on. The hard drive now makes it fly like the desktops of equivalent spec. So people, if u have a laptop that seems slow, get a 7200RPM hard drive! IT'll be the best upgrade ever....


And just to note, this laptop has actually become a desktop. I have it mounted under my desk, attached to a wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless speakers, and a 15" LCD monitor on the table. hehe... perfect for leisure computing after work and for typing up stuff and doing basic research.

At the time of this writing, I believe that Hitachi is the only maker of 7200 RPM drives under the TravelStar line.

[singularity2006]

After weeks of experimenting, it seems that the above discussion about the page file size and placement seems to only work when dealing with older systems with little RAM and slow drives. However, for systems that are severely taxed, a larger pagefile size may be necessary. I realized that for my system, I needed a minimum size of 384MB. I set the max to 512MB. As for the placement of the pagefile, if you have the tweak enabled which dumps the pagefile upon shutdown, by all means the pagefile should be left on C. However, if you choose not to have the pagefile regularly dumped, leaving it on a separate partition would be more advantageous. However, in newer systems using ATA100/133 or SATA, I have yet to notice a major performance difference. It was more noticable in older systems using ATA66. I suppose for eeking out that last bit of performance, keeping the pagefile in the most accessible partition, C, will help lots. Hope this read helps. Cheers!

[elvis]

very nice post, singularity2006. top effort.

some good recommended reading for any microsoft user interested in finding out a little more about what goes on "under the hood" so to speak. most of the above can also be applied to winXP, for those who know how to interpolate their information.

great post! :thumbsup:

[singularity2006]

thanks a bunch Elvis! :beer:

Yeah, I've always done a lot of system modifications here and there but failed to document and archive everything into one easily accessible place. This is that place I suppose. It'll make referencing my stuff much easier for me and for anyone else interested in doing what they need to do. :thumbsup:

[sjaak]

big thanks! i'll look at it soon
i myself are using msconfig.exe for tweaking my windows 2000 (not a real windows expert yet, so i'm a bit scary touching my registry...)

[singularity2006]

msconfig is included in Windows 2000? ??

In anycase, I'll eventually come around to consolidating a single reference of stuff instead of having all these little links here and there spread about in posts... there are so many useful tricks out there.

[elvis]

i vote this gets a sticky. very highly recommended reading.

[DaForce]

XP requires lots of tweaking before it gets near the low memory usage of Win2K. Thats why i use Win2k, runs much better than 2k and has less bug IMHO.

I deal with a lot of customers machines day in and day out, and the majority of the machines that have something go wrong with them are the XP machines, win2k seems pretty solid to me.

Also you can get msconfig for windows 2000 here, its actually the windows XP version but its runs perfect in Win2k.
www.apex.net.au/~daforce/msconfig.exe

[singularity2006]

Originally posted by elvis
i vote this gets a sticky. very highly recommended reading.
hah, cool, thanks for the vote. =) Maybe a mod will see it and it'll get sticky. I'm definitely gonna make edits of this and consolidate all the tips down to something solid and easy to reference when I get around to it.

[singularity2006]

Originally posted by DaForce
Also you can get msconfig for windows 2000 here, its actually the windows XP version but its runs perfect in Win2k.
www.apex.net.au/~daforce/msconfig.exe [/B]

Ah! looks definitely good! Now I can kill the stupid Quicktime Task thinger.... I always knew that was there but never could find how to kill it on startup. Thanks for the link. I'll definitely throw that into my archive of tools for tweak use.

[singularity2006]

Oh, and with regards to Windows XP and DaForce's comment, I couldn't agree more. It has a great deal of functionality in terms of a multiuser corporate office environment and such, but in terms of workhouse power for the CG'er, it just doesn't cut it. Overall, the largest chunk of problem w/ Windows XP is that there were so many routines written to it to make it more user friendly that it just became a bit like bloatware.

Though I do admit that on initial install, it did run quite quickly on my laptop. Everything worked great until I installed any of my Norton products. So a correction w/ a comment I made w/ Yinako; XP actually does run great by itself without installing any software that handles system critical stuff, such as Norton. For most systems of today, I don't think people will notice. However, w/ my really slow laptop, I can safely say that as soon as those system apps pile on, performance takes a major hit real fast. But then again, I also noticed that just multitasking was difficult in XP. With my current laptop system specs, running AIM, Outlook Express, Winamp, and IE, the system lagged and typing was a chore.

A recent chat w/ a friend in the encryption industry gave me some insight into what people in the industry are using. According to him, Windows 1-3x was a first generation true OS but and when Win9x came out, it was a radically diff and better OS. Win98 with a certain degree of truth can be said to be the same. However, each release of Win9x, 98 and ME, were basically intermediaries (like Thalaxis said, expensive upgrades for not much upgrade) XP, built off 2K/NT, basically the same issue. Currently, Windows 2K3 is also an intermediate OS and of no true advantage to have YET. When the official release of Long Horn comes out, we should expect a radically new OS core with some much anticipated system enhancements. Until then, he is telling all his clients that a move from Win2K to anything else is just asking for trouble. For the most part, all the most solid security apps he's developed have only worked solidly in 2K. XP opened up too many security holes for stuff to work right and when it comes to online data transactions such as bank transactions (which is what he develops security software for), XP just doesn't cut it. And to conclude, the Windows 2000 core is solid.

And with regards to why not use UNIX or some other now M$oft infrastructure, it's just not practical in that most of his clients are already M$oft based. The M$ hold on the market is so high already that to switch over would make the developer and the client's job both much more difficult considering even the IT guys that help run the end-user's apps, are already M$ certified. Sure, there are some good and bad things that can be said about that, but in the least, the massive rollout and implementation of system solutions is made easy since the infrastructure is so firmly in place.

.NET is also gonna be a big hitter in that process for M$oft expansion. This is essentially to murder Sun's Java after their lawsuit. Though Sun essentially won the suit, M$oft decided to take the offensive and develop a new application infrastructure that could go anywhere Java could and further. In doing so, M$oft may have just created even firmer ground for themselves in that their OS is so prevalent already and .NET is a new integral piece to their OS. It's just like what M$oft did to take out NEtscape, integrate IE. Look @ how tied in it is today. And with their natural hold on the OS market, .NET will do the same to Java.

And with that, that is why I am currently taking a class in Visual BASIC 6 (M$oft copyrighted the name "BASIC" as "Basic" for some reason, thus making it seem as if there is no longer an acronym, which is totally wrong). I've actually developed my first really decent application for doing temperature conversions. If anyone wants to give it a go, let me know. =) In anycase, maybe when I become a better programmer and get into .NET (BASIC is actually my first true language, next to HTML), I'll make it big, who knows. We'll see. :thumbsup:

[DaForce]

To kill that quicktime system tray dealy, In quicktime, goto edit, then preferences then quicktme preferences. Then untick "Quicktime system tray icon" its in the Browser plug-ing preferences.

[singularity2006]

actually, I did that, but for some reason QTTask is always resident as a process running... I can't figure it out. Oh well, MSConfig will do well in killing it.

Actually, here's another question. I installed Sun's Java onto the laptop and now it has a JSched something in my processes. Can I safely kill it?

[DaForce]

Odd, my work computer doenst have QTTask always running....man thats weird.

Yeah i reckon you can safely remove JSched, although try and remove it properly first (thru settings or something) as its always best to remove things properly than to use msconfig.

[ambient-whisper]

very nice thread. thank you for your effort :) ( sticky )

[singularity2006]

SweeeeeeeeeT! Thanks! :beer:

Yah, as of this post, I have completed consolidating all of the tips and tricks into a more detailed and organized format. Have fun folks. :wavey:

[Emmortal1]

www.tweakxp.com has some nice tweaks to windows XP.

Emmortal

[Brim]

http://www.tweak3d.net/

Some more Win2K / XP Tweaks. Look for them in the right hand nav column.

[singularity2006]

Ah yes, that's definitely a good link. I actually had that in the original set of links before I consolidated them down. Forgot to pop that one back in. Thanks for the info. :thumbsup: Yeah, it has good stuff and a lot of that stuff actually overlaps with everything else already here. But nevertheless, good stuff. And you will find stuff here and there that is unique, so do keep up w/ the reading.

[kwshipman]

Nice stuff singularity2006! Deffinatly need to make time to get some of this done and clean out my case. Noticed its taking a bit longer to boot, performance is slowing just a tad.

Glad to see more stickies in this forum too.

[daddyo]

Congrats,

You graduated from buying your box to building your box... Since you seem to enjoy squeezing every last drop of performance from your system, you'll love a custom system.

Raph

[singularity2006]

heh, since when did I ever buy my own prebuilt box? I get those @ work sure, but when it comes to home use, everything is custom built, except for that Dell that I got from my bro. :thumbsup:

[daddyo]

I stand corrected! Forgive me for making assumptions.

R~

[singularity2006]

hah, no problem at all buddy. ^.^

Actually, contrary to popular belief, I really don't use very high end hardware. Most of my stuff is budget sales stuff with some decent quality. I wish I had the budget and justification to buy cool hardware like Mr. Greg Hess here in our forum. In anycase, just in case u folks are wondering, my system specs. (for my workstation):

Soyo Dragon KT400 Ultra Platinum Ed.
Athlon XP 2600+ w/ 333MHz FSB
512MB PC2700 Mushkin
Radeon 8500LE w/ 128MB DDR RAM
Creative PCDVD 12x
Sony CRX CDRW 52x24x52
Iomega Zip100
YEData 7-in-1 floppy and media reader
Antec ATC ... 304? case.

My file server (this is the only prebuilt system in the house, and it was given to me by my bro):

Dell XPST450 (now running instead of 450, 750, and in a couple days, 850. The main diff between the XPST series was mainly processor so when I get my new processor in a couple days, it should be a Dell XPST850r)
384MB PC100
80GB Baracuda IV
Maxtor ATA133 controller
Kingwin Hot Swap Drive Bay
PC DVD
Iomega Zip100
Turtle Beach Audio
ATI All In Wonder 128 Pro 32MB
Iogear 2port USB 2.0 add on card

I'm going to max out the memory after I max out the CPU. When I'm done, it'll be a 768MB system. Mainly, I like this system because it's so difficult to modify in terms of BIOS and other "under the hood" settings. Because of that, it's been damn stable, and is a great test bed for stuff. I mostly use it as a file and application server (not in the most literal hi-tech networking sense) for my home and as the system I use to prep other systems for install and backup. That hot swap drive has proved invaluable and has made my job sooooo much easier.

In anycase, with regard to system tweaking, I ran across another idea that seemed a bit fascinating. It is possible to disable all 16bit subsystem compatibility functionality in Windows 2K. However, I really have no clue which apps I have that might still be 16bit. I have a lot of apps and sometimes run into 16bit stuff. Has anyone ever tried killing off 16bit support?

[Gyan]

I've used 2000 for about 18 months and XP for about 10 months now on almost identical configurations ((2000/2.26Ghz and XP/2.4Ghz) .

I use 3dsmax 3.1

I also have XSI EXP 3.0 and Maya PLE 4.0 installed.

I don't have any anti-virus or firewall stuff loaded. In fact, my startup is minimal and in my experience, XP is a touch faster. Definitely, not any slower. Driver compatibility is better in XP.

The key is just have a core set of applications installed and memory-resident. Don't use P2P. Don't install 101 media players or browsers. Don't use IE (can't believe the shit that gets downloaded), use Firebird with extensions instead.

[singularity2006]

sounds good. Yeah, that's true. I run into a lot of systems that have like a gazillion different media player programs that all do the same thing. Those definitely take up space. As for IE, I generally don't like messing w/ it since it's been so heavily integrated into the OS already. And as for K++... what's that? I'm not familiar w/ it and how is it like P2P?

And no antivirus? Wow, u live in the edge... hehehee. I couldn't live w/out one. I get email a lot and I just gotta have that protection. As for a firewall, I use a hardware based one so it's no problem on the system.

And as for system config, yes, I do notice that on systems with more than adequate resources, such as the one you have listed, XP and 2K run equally well regardless of what is loaded on either system (assuming both are using the same amount of stuff of course). But w/ my really low end laptop, performance (actually, boot time; the original thought to doing all these mods was to decrease boot time) really took a hit in both cases. After installing Norton AntiVirus, it took about 25 passes of that blue bar in WinXP before the boot screen went to the logon screen. With Win2K, the during logon but all in all, it was still a bit faster than XP. Why? I have no clue.

Anyhow, I'm doing some VB programming to for my class so I stuck MS Viz Studio 6 onto the laptop. That gave a hard performance hit too. But overall, now that the system is up and running, my laptop runs pretty darn well. W/ XP, after configuring everything as close to exact as the Win2K config, the system lagged like crazy.... while typing, the comp would be about 2 or 3 characters behind everything I typed..... really hurtful. So I threw it back to Win2K and it's worked great ever since.

But yah, good stuff on ensuring that one installs only what they need and for sure will use.... not all the stuff they "might use."

[DaForce]

I havnt used a virus scanner for about 4 years. And still havnt gotten a virus....**knock on wood** Plus i dont really see the need, as long as you know what you are doing and know what to look out for. And also keep all your windows patches up to date. Seems to work fine for me. Infact the only virus i have ever had was Chernobyl (spelling) back in the days where P200's where king of the hill, and i heard it on TV that this nasty virus was about to become active, and about 15mins later my computer died. It killed my motherboard :-(

XP by default does use more of the computers resources (mainly RAM) and that is why Greg Hess wrote that large article on how to tweak XP so that its RAM usage is much closer to Win2k's.

Plus i have seen and had to deal with too many XP bugs at my work (tech support), and it has really put me off XP. Where as win2k, has been nothing but the proper gentleman. Never had any problems with it at all..

[kwshipman]

Have you guys seen the article about Microsoft finally setting it messaging service to off by defalut on XP sp2. Its about time the figured that 99% of people dont use that, except to send adds.

[Emmortal1]

Actually some large corporate entities use it to broadcast system shutdowns. Although I never could understand why, but I've seen it in more than one corporation.

Emmortal

[daddyo]

Yeah sometimes it is useful to push upgrades or to perform server maintenance. In both cases, IT staff may want to shut down clients remotely, instead of using sneaker rubber. Also, someone burning the midnight oil at work can be alerted that the network is about to go down.... I've used it.

In either case, message service is not very useful for a single user or even a small office.

raphael

Also, you may want to get the various windows resource kits, downloadable from the technet section at microsoft, they have some handy utilities. Many are nitwerk administration tools, but some are handy for personal use.

[oxyg3n]

I have just finished reading through this and I feel a little uninformed, but what is the page file in win2000? Or maybae I should ask what does it do?

[DaForce]

A page file is like virtual memory (often called that as well) , and its there so that when you physical ram fills up it has somewhere to overflow. The page file is much slower than the physical ram, and that is why people buy lots of ram, so they can avoid using the page file as much as possible.

This link explains it better
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

although the link is for XP is pretty much the same in Win2K

[elvis]

for those looking to REALLY cut back a WinXP/2000 install, check out a product called XPLite from LitePC:

http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html

i've used the trial version, and it's very nice. the pro version allows you to cut your system right back to a bare OS, although for graphics professionals that's probably not something you want to do all the way (video drivers and directX are still needed for most pro 3D applications :) ).

even with the trial version i've seen a small speed increase, and more particularly a "bulk" decrease on my system.

[kwshipman]

so how do I figure out what all of these services are and which one I can get rid of?

http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/processes.jpg

Same goes with the startup programs

http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/regcleaner.jpg

I really dont want to cut something that I need.

[singularity2006]

Can you take a screen shot of the system services list from start menu > control panel > administrative tools > system services? I read that a lot easier than anything else. In anycase, this fellow here has a very comprehensive list of Windows 2000 system services to help you make an informed decision when killing off stuff:

http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/win2kservice411.htm

In anycase, if you can up a screen shot of what you have, I can probably tell you with some certainty what other stuff you can be rid of depending on your system or network setup.

As for your startup stuff, I personally would get rid of the ipod stuff, omnipage, HPDJ, and synchro manager (mobsync). The assumption however, is that none of these are truly needed on system startup and can be manually started later when needed. Otherwise, they suck up precious system resources. By the way, on page one of this thread, DaForce was kind enough to post a link to get msconfig.exe. I would throw that into c:\windows\system32\ so you can run it from the run command. It's a bit more familiar for most people since it was in Win9x. You can use that to cut down stuff that comes up during startup. By the way, what antivirus do you use and can you also give us a list of stuff you have in your Windows startup folder? If you are using Norton Antivirus, there are a few things you can do to reduce its impact on system resources (in the short run that is) and depending on what's in your startup folder, stuff can probably get trimmed down there too. :wavey:

[kwshipman]

Originally posted by singularity2006
Can you take a screen shot of the system services list from start menu > control panel > administrative tools > system services? I read that a lot easier than anything else. In anycase, this fellow here has a very comprehensive list of Windows 2000 system services to help you make an informed decision when killing off stuff:

http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/win2kservice411.htm

In anycase, if you can up a screen shot of what you have, I can probably tell you with some certainty what other stuff you can be rid of depending on your system or network setup.

http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/services.jpg

I assume you only needed the ones that were started and on automatic right? I'll go through that list to see what I come up with and compare it to what you find. Thanks

As for your startup stuff, I personally would get rid of the ipod stuff, omnipage, HPDJ, and synchro manager (mobsync). The assumption however, is that none of these are truly needed on system startup and can be manually started later when needed. Otherwise, they suck up precious system resources. By the way, on page one of this thread, DaForce was kind enough to post a link to get msconfig.exe. I would throw that into c:\windows\system32\ so you can run it from the run command. It's a bit more familiar for most people since it was in Win9x. You can use that to cut down stuff that comes up during startup. By the way, what antivirus do you use and can you also give us a list of stuff you have in your Windows startup folder? If you are using Norton Antivirus, there are a few things you can do to reduce its impact on system resources (in the short run that is) and depending on what's in your startup folder, stuff can probably get trimmed down there too. :wavey:

I'll get rid of that stuff. I noticed on one of your links on the first page that mobsync was some adware or something, so I already removed that. I have no antivirus at the moment and my startup folder is empty.

p.s. some more info that you may need. I have a printer and scanner and am connected to the internet via Cable modem through a PCI NIC. At one point this pc was on a network but is no longer. only other pci card installed is a USB/Firewire. It is only used for internet, games, minor 3D, and extensive photoshop. if you need more info let me know.

[singularity2006]

ah wow, it looks like you already have quite a few of those services terminated. I'm using a TNT2 on my system @ work and I killed off all the driver services. I don't notice a difference. But then again, the closest thing to resource intensive that I do is Photoshop and I'm not exactly sure how necessary all the power is to do the work. HID Input service looks familiar. I'm not sure but try setting that to manual and reset your computer, use it, and see what happens. If anything funny goes wrong, re-active it. And does your system have only one user, the Administrator? If so, you can safely set "security accounts manager" to manual. That's for storage of multiple user accounts. And I'm pretty sure you can safely set iPod service to manual. And as for the modem, if you had a router to it, or perhaps a setting within the modem that can be used to manually define a permanent IP for your system, you could probably disable both the DNS Client as well as DHCP client. My network uses all manually assigned IP's and DNS's so those two services serve no function.

By the way, scroll down your services list and see if you have anything set to manual but is currently status as running. Those you can set to fully automatic so any loading occurs on startup rather than while in the middle of running an app. I'm not sure what performance difference it makes, but it seems to make more sense to load everything @ once instead of having a little bit load here and there as other apps are started and used.

In anycase, I'm gonna write up a thing later on and post it here regarding what I do with my systems when I set them up now. But yeah, that'll be for a little bit later.

[kwshipman]

the HID is for my tablet I believe, if so, I dont want to change it. I have two users, admin and Kelly W. Shipman. I use the latter to log in with as I once read to not use the Admin for day to day use. If this is not neccassary I could change it, though I dont like messing with users as I locked myself out of my own PC before.Oh yes the Ipod service, I dont even own an Ipod. I assume that Itunes put it there.

I had gone through the services before is why many were already dissabled, but I want to make sure I get everything.

The list I posted shows everything that is running, manual or automatic.

Looking foward to that write up:thumbsup:

[singularity2006]

ah yes, in that case, leave the user accounts manager enabled! Hah, anyhow, I'll see if I can write a summary of what I did to my system sometime before I head off out from work this afternoon. :thumbsup:

And speaking of HID... that's weird because I don't have a tablet yet I remember seeing it a few times on my services... wEIRD.!!!

[kwshipman]

I just looked it up, "Human Interface Device", can be tablet, gamepad, joystick, etc.

[singularity2006]

how funny. My keyboard still works without it enabled or running... hahaha.

[singularity2006]

Okay, so here's what I would do when setting up a brand new system (or building one for that matter):

Building the System
I usually always have four IDE devices. For increases performance, I usually EBay an ATA card for real cheap and install that in there. Then I would get single channel IDE cables so one per device per port. My CDROM and CDRW each go into the primary IDE and then the secondary IDE, respectively. My hard disk drive(s) each get their own channel on the ATA card. Anyhow, that's that for that. Anyhow, I have my own little idiosyncrasies about putting together a system including never installing any PCI cards if its already onboard. I just like having a clean case. The only other card I usually have is my AGP card. Everything else is onboard. I always replace the OEM heat sink and fan with something higher end and apply AS3. I'm also a bit anal about cables so I tie them up into very clean bundles such that the space above the motherboard is always free. I usually hide the cables behind the power supply and the case's side panel assuming there is space. Otherwise, I start getting creative..... but yeah, I'll stop there about that.

Setting up the drive
When setting up a new hard drive, I always use the disk utility supplied by the manufacturer if possible. For example, Seagate and IBM come with DiscWizard and Disk Manager, respectively. The generic Windows format utility causes a loss of anywhere between 100MB to 500MB depending on how things work. On top of that, it's slow as heck. The utilities supplied by the manufacturers are setup to work specifically with the hard disk drive so you get ALL the disk space and the format is only a fraction of what it takes for Windows. I'm a fan of partitioning drives larger than 10GB. My general rule is this:

C: 5GB - OS ONLY
D: 2GB - PAGEFILE and Temp Files and Internet Cache
E: 5GB - APPS ONLY
F: Whatever else for storage (some people might like splitting this into two partitions, one for games or what not).

After a clean install of Win2K or WinXP
Okay, here's the part where I would apply ALL the tweaks in this performance guide. That is, after finishing the initial install, do NOT install anything else yet. Just start modifying the system. Stuff I do that I don't remember if I mentioned in this thread:

1. Change temp folders:
a. Right mouse click "My Computer" > Properties > Advanced > Environment variables > change all values of TMP and TEMP to D:\Temp\
b. Right mouse click IE > Internet Options > General > Temporary Internet Files > Settings > change size to 1MB (on broadband, why bother caching files and waste disk space when you can just have it all re-downloaded), then move the temporary internet files to D:\ (setting it to just D will automatically generate the folder "Temporary Internet files" for you)
c. Edit the registry and change the location of the ActiveX cache. On page one of this thread, there is a link to the other thread where I mention specific registry tweaks that people often use. One of them is changing the ActiveX cache.

2. Change the pagefile location:
Right mouse click "my computer" > properties > advanced > Performance Options > Pagefile > change the location from C to D. Use the same values from C unless you have a lot of RAM and thus a lot of default pagefile space. Then you might want to change the size to fit D. Having a pagefile greater than 768MB for some people might be a bit excessive.

3. Change startup and recovery settings:
Generally, if there is a memory dump, Windows likes making large log files and dumps the memory errors to file. I don't know how to debug so I'd rather that stuff never take up any space in the first place.
Rght mouse click "my computer" > properties > advanced > startup and recovery > System Failure > Write Debugging Information: NONE. And since I'm not on any corporate network, I can deselect "send administrative alert."

After Performing tweaks
Install and run all Windows Updates necessary. This is where my personal touch comes in. I use XPLite and it works damn well. I cut out all the server components, most of the accessories, net meeting, the dialup stuff (since I'm on DSL and have no modem anyway), and whatever else I deem not necessary. From that point on, Windows works pretty well and is considerably smaller. By default, there are about 67 components Windows installs. I cut it down to just about 20. No screen savers, no paint brush, imaging, etc. I also cut out quite a few of the components by editing c:\winnt\inf\sysoc.inf and erasing all instances of the term "hide," which shows the windows components that may be removed when you go to "add remove programs > add remove Windows components."

Then I would go through and kill off all system services that I would never use.

After cutting Windows down
Install all remaining stuff.

After installing stuff
After installing all your software, I start customizing the system by doing stuff like, clearing the stupid Acrobat Reader 6 installer cache that it leaves in C:\Winnt\Cache. I also set the system to have no sounds and clear all the sounds. I also go as far as erasing anything *.bak, *.log, *.txt, and other stuff. I personally also like condensing my start menu down like crazy..... real crazy. I'm a nut about organization so it's very small with very few sub menus if any. Some of my other things I like doing is installing TweakUI from Microsft's Power Toys package and begin customizing other things such as start menu display speed. I like having it pop up instantly instead of waiting so I change that setting, have it clear all caches and temporary stuff on shut down/startup. Etc etc etc... Whatever. the rest is up to you.

After installing stuff
I use Microsoft's RegCleaner application to erase all extra and strange entries and then I use Diskeeper Pro to perform a boot time defragmentation of all drives. Diskeeper works great in that it clears up MFT fragments, pagefile fragments, and all sorts of other things.

After all that
Then I use SiSoft Sandra Max 3 and then do a full benchmark comparison of my system to comparable systems and then see what recommendations, if any, SiSoft Sandra produces, and I start implementing them. The rest is in BIOS tweaking and so forth. http://www.rojakpot.com/ has some great tweaks for tuning your BIOS settings. Of them all that I use the most, disable all boot devices except for C and then disable all ports I don't use like serial, parallel, infrared, etc. And blah blah blah, disable BIOS caching, video caching, and etc.

Have fun! :thumbsup: Aighty, off to school.... I think. I gotta see what work I have left, if any, before I do that.

[kwshipman]

one more question. In my startup pic that was posted earlier, it has Winmgt32--winmgt.exe on there twice. doing a search to verify, there is only on winmgt.exe on my pc. would it be safe to remove one of these or should I leave it alone?

[singularity2006]

hahaha, yeah, that's a strange one. I've seen that happen with other apps though, not winmngmt in particular. I would be very careful and backup whatever you're working on before you kill it. In about half the occasions I've killed the process, it killed EVERYTHING. Crashed the system, etc. The other half is benign... hehee, so I'm not too sure about that one.

[kwshipman]

hmmm, risk seems to out weigh the reward on that one then.

but that is okay, due to the info on this thread I have cut my startup times from approx 2 min to just under 1. Shutdown time has gone from 50 sec to 15 (with a couple of time being in 5).


available physical memory went from 263244 to 426000.

Here is the before (http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/performance.jpg)

and the after (http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/performance_after.jpg)

and my services

before (http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/services.jpg)

and after (http://members.fortunecity.com/kwshipman/services_after.jpg)

and I highly recommend broad band users to do the registry fix on the first page that allows you to download more than two things from a site. its great on sites with a lot of large images. They even have a thing you can download that will make the changes for you if you dont want to touch the registry. And they also provide an undo for it as well.

thanks again singularity2006!:applause: :applause:

[singularity2006]

hahaha, incredible!! :thumbsup:

Looks like we have another satisfied customer. :beer:

Heh, I would go a bit further and disable more services though. How often do you use CDRW's? I've never relied much on that technology so I disable the CDRW support. =)

[kwshipman]

almost daily. That is the only method I have for transfering file between home and school at the mament. hopeing that I get a USB drive soon though.

[singularity2006]

Ah wow. The first time I tried using a CDRW, the CDRW disc died on me and lost all my data. After that, I never used them again. I only use regular CDR's or my lovely brand new all aluminum GEIL 256MB USB 2.0 removable pen drive....... it's too bad they don't manufactur the thing anymore..... that was the best looking pen drive I ever saw ever since. CAn't beat it. =)

In anycase, to add on, that whole thing with the download thing is a must! That whole issue of having a max of 2 downloads from a server @ any given time applies not to just downloading a file from a link, but from images loading on a page. On any web page, if the images are from the same server, a maximum of only two images will download at a time until they are all downloaded. If you are on DSL, this is a waste of bandwidth. Setting the registry setting will allow up to 14 objects to be downloaded from the same server at once..... a much more efficient allocation of bandwidth. And pages are so much more snappy too. :thumbsup:

[toddy333]

A little problem.

I was following some of the tricks for reducing memory consumption in Windows 2000 and I found that my quick launch buttons were gone and I cannot right click an empty area on the taskbar to click Properties to hopefully get the quick launch icons back!

What do I do?

It appears that I cannot use active desktop as well!

[toddy333]

It appears I have fixed the problem. I downloaded the TweakUI program and I feel that when I was playing around with the settings to optimize Win2000, I lost my quicklaunch buttons. Then I remembered that a while back I downloaded a cool tool called X-teq systems that allows you to cusomize windows OS fully. I downloaded all the plugins and played with those settings and now everything works fine again. For a minute there, I was scared that I may have to pull out my dusty Win2000 setup CD.

[singularity2006]

ooh, one thing about those programs that I took into consideration was the fact that they often load on startup to maintain the tweaks u have made. In that case, u waste "precious boot resources" so what I do is I hard code what adjustments I want by editing the Windows registry myself. However, this is a tedious thing to do if u have A LOT of tweaks that u desire. In that case, just use the program. For me, I only need the thing that disables active desktop and takes the "shortcut to" wordage off of new shortcuts, and off go the shortcut arrows too... they're visually distracting. Anyhow, if u have more, eh, use the program since it can be irritating to find the registry keys one by one to do the changes. However, if u only plan to make the changes once and only once, it might be worth looking into. But yeah, these tweaks I usually do only after a clean format. It helps ensure everything is clean clean clean up to that point.

And when I say "precious system resources," I mean that lightly. Most people won't give a damn or notice at all. But I used these tweaks mainly for my really old laptop that doesn't have much to work with. It's like developing the power up procedure for Apollo 13 without frying the system.

[nvvm]

Originally posted by yinako
heres a suggestion, instal winXP.
I have been using win2k for long time until a friend convenced me to change it, and there was a big speed boost, xp start 3 times faster and GUI are more responsive. Never looked back. I have both and winxp does have a SLIGHT speed advantage or so it seems. But xp is filled with intergrated spyware.

[singularity2006]

interesting. What do you base that opinion on? The one thing I personally look for is memory load. WinXP in general has a much higher memory consumption load than Win2K. As for boot speed.... it all depends on a lot of things.

[nvvm]

Really a fresh install vs a fresh install xp Seems faster. But when you throw programs on xp it gets incredible slow In comparision. Also on laptops 2k wins hands down, as xp makes my laptop slow down to a crawl. Yeah that's pretty much my take on it. I will agree with you on this norton runs very slow Downloaded the demo and it makes the system crawl on a virus scan I can't do much else on my web station(1g athlon 384mb ram)

I think Xp can be faster in some instances if you can turn off a lot of the crap it does that's not needed. Oh yeah btw I really hate xp.


Edit: Also forgot it was searches that seemed faster on xp as well

[singularity2006]

Yeah, on the initial install, WinXP is a bit faster in most respects.

And yes, the searches are faster because of the Journaling feature of the WinXP version of NTFS.

And yes, Norton... bloat ware. *sighs*

But yes, 2K all the way for me too. :beer:

[Sieb]

New Tweaking Guide for XP

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks1.htm

[oxyg3n]

Hey Guys,

I cant figure out how to change the location of my tmp files once I get to them. The only options I have are new, edit, delete and as far as I can tell none of these options let mr change the location of the tmp files.

[singularity2006]

right mouse click "my computer" > "properties" > "performance options" > "environment variables" > double click on instances of TMP and TEMP in the top and bottom windows and change their values.

[oxyg3n]

Thanks Singularity,

I did not realize that I had to chang the "%rootblahblah" to a location on a hd thanks for your help.

[singularity2006]

After re-applying the tweaks selectively and going through the windows registry to kill stuff that loads on run, I have successfully achieved a full Windows 2000 install with ALL my major apps while keeping totaly memory load on bootup under 100MB..... 30MB under what I had last time. This is great!:beer:

[Sieb]

CachemanXP is a system service designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing several caches, auto-recovering RAM and fine tuning a number of system settings. Auto-Optimization makes it suitable for novice
and intermediate users yet it is also powerful and versatile enough for computer experts. Backups of settings ensure that all user modifications can be reversed with a single click.


http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4102.html

[Tarrbot]

One of the things to note, Singularity2006, is that your "boost" from one system to another did not come from adding an IDE controller and drive. It came from boosting your RAM from 64MB to 512MB. RAM is so much faster than any HDD...on the order of tens of times fasters.

Just an FYI. ;)

[singularity2006]

yah, good point. But the jump from ATA66 to ATA100 was pretty radical. I definitely did notice a performance diff after adding that card and drive. Defrag can actually be done in one sitting. =)

But yeah, that laptop... it's still chugging along.... *sigh*

[fasteez]

with the Logon UI disabled it mades the boot and shudown 10 times faster.

[singularity2006]

Hmmm, that's interesting. How do you go about disabling the logon UI? From what I remember, the only thing you can really do is an auto logon, but still, it calls on that function. Can you go into more detail about that?

[Mad3dMax]

Thanks for some of the links! Many are of a specific technical nature and should I run into one of those particular problems I now know where to go :beer:

Many of your questions are related to the Window OS, especially 2k and XP. I stumbled across this site and although BV is not into CGI his dedication to gaming can help you free up resorces and make for a faster PC. Both of these OS's have way to many un-needed processes running by default.

Read this site carefully and follow his guides. Choose which one suits your needs. But remember the golden rule: READ! There are descritptions of all the processes and why you need them. What's good for one may not be for another.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

I hope this will help some of you,

Mad

[singularity2006]

Thanks for the link MadMax. I've actually gotten that link already posted up in the first page. But that site is a great site to have as a reference. I think he's had some updates lately, including a few new added services/sections including stuff relating more directly to WinXP.

[Mad3dMax]

It is I who should thank you singularity and I have a confession to make; I am a navigational moron that often gets lost on large threads that abound with techy stuff. The link was actually posted twice by you on the 1st page. I apologize for missing this :banghead:

After changing platforms from Mac to PC, due to the necessity to run certain applications, I have discoverd that Billy-Boys OS has become like the "Hydra" as in Greek mythology. When chopping off one of the nine heads each is replaced by two new ones!

Does the madness ever cease?

[fasteez]

hmm its in the panel control then click on the "user account" icon (sorry i dont know the english name of it im running french windows xp, my translation may be approximative), then click on "modify the way users open and close a session", there you can switch off both logon ui ( so youll have the default login box , the same as win2K ^^) and fast user switching ( if its a single user computer or near its really useless ).It eat some ressources like saving application data and context to restore when you switch etc etc.
on my computer it really double the boot speed ( no need to load logon ui now that its useless )
and you can still activate the auto logon , of course.

[singularity2006]

Just to let u folks know, I rewrote the entire guide with a bit more detail and hopefully a bit more organization. I also added in a system ventillation guide that I wrote originally at AMD Forums. Hope u guys enjoy the reading, cheers!

[Segmoria]

In WinXP where do I change the path of the pagefile?
I just want to transfer it to an another partition that I'm using just for temporary files and cache, not the default C:\.
I cant seem to find the appropriate setting in the Performance options > Virtual Memory nor Enviroment Variables, though I've changed them too.
Or at least does anyone recall the actual registry key to go and change it manually ?

[singularity2006]

In WinXP where do I change the path of the pagefile?
I just want to transfer it to an another partition that I'm using just for temporary files and cache, not the default C:\.
I cant seem to find the appropriate setting in the Performance options > Virtual Memory nor Enviroment Variables, though I've changed them too.
Or at least does anyone recall the actual registry key to go and change it manually ?It's under the virtual memory menu. It will display a list of all your available fixed drives on your computer. Click on C, which is where the default is, and under the minimum and maximum pagefile size, type in "0" and click "set." Then click on the drive you wish to use and type in the minimum and maximum values. For most people, 384MB-512MB will be sufficient. Some will go from 512-768MB but anything past that might be overkill unless you don't have much RAM and deal with massively large graphic files (this should be the same way you do it in XP).

Please note that you should not place the pagefile under a different partition of the same physical drive in that this will lead to a performance decrease (the reasons as to why this occurs is addressed in the guide). If you move the pagefile to a different physical drive however, it MUST be as fast as the original drive or faster for you to notice a performance gain. In most cases, as long as you leave the pagefile on C and enable the "ClearPageFileAtShutdown" option in the registry, then you will have no problems with fragmentation of the pagefile on C.

[Mad3dMax]

Just in case you don't know how to find your vitural memory settings it's found here: Control Panels/System/Advanced tab/ then click Settings under Performance. Now you can follow s.2006's instructions :)

[Segmoria]

ok I found it!
thanx singularity2006 and Mad3dMax!

I dont think if this is the most relevant place to post this but since the conversation is about win2k,
has anyone had any problems with DrWatson in Win2000+sp4 ?
related to a particular <process has already exited> weird message?
all of a sudden some of my programs and internal windows applications started popping up that weird error and then shutting down.
I dont think it's a particular DrWatson error, as I tried turning it off and the error still occured.

that was the reason I had to temporarily move to XP :sad: :sad: :sad:
anyone has experienced anything similar and found what it was all about?

[singularity2006]

That's a weird one. Haven't had any Dr. Watson issues before. I'd post in the regular forum for that.

[SpeedAS]

Hi guys!

Some very interesting reading here!
Here's an addition: When you render a sequence, you'll probably render it multiple BMP files in case the system crashes or for aftereffects and stuff. To speed up you HDD operations you might want to disable file access for updating the accesstime on a file. Basicly what happens is that the OS (Win2K or WinXP) will not update these last accessed or last modified time. when you have alot of these files then the system performance is boosted quite well. There's a tool called fsutil.exe that will do the trick.

Second addition or actually a question: My primary HDD failed a few weeks back. This was a reason for me to try-out WinXP SP2 as a new setup (my previous Win2K config had run for 3 years without any issue or what so ever). I found out that there was something that kept blocking Internet access for some om my applications. I tried to disable several services and new features of WinXP SP2 like Windows Firewall and stuff, but WinXP somehow kept blocking the access. This means that my network render setup in Mac e.g. didn't work at all. I've now reverted back to Win2K, but I feel that there must be a solution for this issue.

[pixeloddity]

XP requires lots of tweaking before it gets near the low memory usage of Win2K. Thats why i use Win2k, runs much better than 2k and has less bug IMHO.

I deal with a lot of customers machines day in and day out, and the majority of the machines that have something go wrong with them are the XP machines, win2k seems pretty solid to me.

[lukx]

...and what about win 2003? Anyone tested how does it perform in cg field?

[k99]

Hi guys, its really good to see all the technical specs been brought onto the desk to help me. I have a question here but my purpose here is purely looking to get the best performance out off my new coming pc.

Im getting a dual Xeon workstation with Wildcat video card, + 1gb DDR333.....

So what is the best OS i should get for this mechine? Im not sure which OS (Win2K or WinXp) support dual cpu better. I'll be glad to hear some response. :)

[singularity2006]

uhmm.... I'm not a dual CPU person. But in anycase, I'd first do a search on that topic in the forums. It's been discussed many times over.

[FunkLord]

Hi Singularity2006. First of all many thanks for your extensive guide. I believe there are many people that take the tips they read here with them without even giving you any credit.

I was one of them until just now. :)
But now I've cleaned up my family's PC a few days ago, and I thought I could tell you what I've learned from all of that.

First of all, we're talking about a Celeron 433 Mhz here, 128MB SD-Ram, and a 15GB IBM drive (a 5400rpm one). Before I took up the work, the computer was running a dual-boot Win98 and WinXP, with the Win98 not even working anymore, and the WinXP being crammed full of strange processes (ever heard of a P2PNetworking.exe running in the background? Whatever it is, I don't like it).
The harddrive itself was divided into 5 (!) partitions, three of them being around 3GB big and full of documents, games, music and other stuff, and of course two primary partitions, one for each OS. All FAT32.

Without wanting to go into the details, here's the result:
Two Partitions, one 2GB WinXP partition and the other 13GB carrying the personal documents (which I managed to shrink down to 2,5GB, by the way). Both NTFS, and defragmented after all the installation.
Cleaned up all the other unnecessary system processes, disabled WinXP's 20 biggest annoyances with the help of AntiSpyXP (http://www.xp-antispy.org/) (a must-have tool for any WinXP installation, it's the very first thing I run), disabled other resource hogs like Hibernation (no one uses it anyway, and it uses as much HD space as you have memory in your PC), Remote Desktop support and other things. Further installed Opera as a browser replacement, Miranda as the IM replacement, and the K-Lite codec pack with the MediaPlayer classic to replace the Windows Media Player.

The result is now that the PC is about twice as fast, be it booting, launching applications or shutting down. Couldn't have done that without your tips, though.

[singularity2006]

coooool!! Thanks for the testimonial! I'm glad things worked well for you. I myself have applied these modifications to all of the computers at work and have saved our company a few thousand since we didn't have to buy new computers. We ended up spending about a thousand for three new LCD's.... a much better investment.

[rybeck]

C:\ Operating System ONLY: Allocate 5GB
D:\ Scratch Disk, temporary files, and Internet Cache: Allocate 2GB
E:\ Programs ONLY: Allocate between 5-10GB depending on your needs.
F:\ Documents and storage only: Allocate the remainder of the drive space here.

(The above settings may be easily adjusted for your own personal needs, of course.)




singularity2006,


I have been adapted your idea on partitioning my HDDs; Primary is 74GB Western Raptor, The other one for storage is maxtor 300GB..
I gave 3 partition on Raptor (C:/ and D:/ has 5GB each, and E:\ has rest of space; As you may noticed, I literally copied the way you set your partitions on your system), and i have been happy camper for now...
Recently I relaized whenever I defragment the HDD (especially, C:\, "OS Drive") it warns me, HDD is almost full, and I need to make more free space (15 percent, as the computer recommended, kindly) to run effective defragmentation... and now I have no clue what I need to clean up to reduce the fat on my C:\...

Any suggestion to clean up my HDD?


Thanks in Advance...

[FunkLord]

If you followed singularity2005's orders, you should be left with nothing but the basic windows installation (including any necessary drivers, of course) on drive C:. Even Windows XP only takes up 1GB, so I assume you have installed several programs on C:, right? If so, consider moving more programs to E:.

If it's the scratch / temp file partition that's causing the problems, you might want to consider either changing the swap file sizes (like lowering the size of Windows' disk cache), or expanding the size of that partition with a tool like PartitionMagic (http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/). Good thing is you won't have to delete or move any files in order to do so, PartitionMagic will take care of that.
Oh, and of course you can also increase the size of C: that way.

PS: I personally skipped the scratch / temp file partition part, because my current disk space is limited and it's use varies so much that I would end up repartitioning every week. Need a new drive... :rolleyes:

[rybeck]

Funklord,

As I was building up my system with various installation, I did force to relocate the destination of files instead of just letting sit on C:\
However, I had no choice for some (actually many) of files has been settled down in C:\
While I was following singularity2005's order, I relocated many S/W on E:\, and mainly scratch/Temp files were forwarded to D:\ which manintain 20 to 30 % free space... (again, its allocated space is 5gb, as singularity2005's setup)

I am still wondering, HOW I can force to relocate every single files to get into a certain directory (or folder, if I am allowed to use easy terminology)...

PartitionMagic sounds good, but I am losing trust over Symantec quickly in these days, and I may hold it for awhile...

Thanks, and hope to hear some more...

[FunkLord]

I can fully understand your doubts about Symantec. I had my own experiences with Norton Antivirus on the computer of my parents, but that's a different story.

PartitionMagic however isn't actually made by Symantec at all, but by a company called PowerQuest. They also made BootMagic, an excellent program if you want to make a true dual-boot system (e.g. Win98 and WinXP on the same computer, works by hiding either of the two partitions and giving the other one the drive C: letter).

Symantec just bought the whole company, similar to what happened to Macromedia recently, or what Google did to Keyhole's Earth Viewer (now known as Google Earth). So remember, it says Symantec on the outside, but it's PowerQuest on the inside.


As for relocating files: If I understood him correctly, singularity2006 says that he chose to install all programs on the other drive. Trying to relocate any piece of software after it has been installed will not work in most cases (or you would have to change the corresponding registry entries that go with it). And of course, some setup routines won't allow you to define the path at all. Others might install the core package into the path you've specified, but will place all configuration files, saved games, even example and tutorial files into the "User documents and settings" folder on C:.
Which actually leads me to a new question: Is there any way to relocate the Windows user account files to a different drive? Or do they always have to stay in C:\User documents and settings\ ? Any ideas there, singularity2006?

[singularity2006]

Which actually leads me to a new question: Is there any way to relocate the Windows user account files to a different drive? Or do they always have to stay in C:\User documents and settings\ ? Any ideas there, singularity2006?

Positively, there is a way! The key where all this information is stored is here:

Key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\
Name: "ProfilesDirectory"
Value: [change to the folder you want]

Mind you, that you must transfer your profiles over before you log off. Otherwise you'll be in a whole world of hurt when you log back on.

[FunkLord]

Nice. Thanks a lot, man!

[Somhairle]

hey singularity2006!

excellent straight forward thread...I've been tweaking windows for years. but you've shed some great light on other tweaks that I've never tried. so thank you!

Q: Ok, so there's a way to move the windows user account files to a different drive, is there also a way that when installing the programs that the setup lists E as the DEFAULT setting? Its not much of a bother to change it manualy, but it would be another pet peeve banished for me. :)

I have my new system set up but the hard drive was a left-over from my old machine 150gb ata. I bought a 200 sata ii (WD caviar) today to improve performance. I was thinking of using your setup as a starting point:


* C:\ Operating System ONLY: Allocate 5GB
* D:\ Scratch Disk, temporary files, and Internet Cache: Allocate 2GB
* E:\ Programs ONLY: Allocate between 5-10GB depending on your needs.
* F:\ Documents and storage only: Allocate the remainder of the drive space here.but with these values:

s-ata2 200Gb:
* C:\ Operating System ONLY: 5Gb
* D:\ Scratch Disk, temporary files, and Internet Cache: 10Gb ??
* E:\ Programs ONLY: 30Gb
* F:\ Documents and storage only: Allocate the remainder of the drive space

ATA 150Gb:
* G:\ Storage

Could I make any better use of the ATA 150? - appart from using it as a book weight ;) its a noisy POS!

EDIT: When making partitions (especially a workstation for 3D and audio) should the cluster sizes be larger (or smaller?) than 4kb (ie: 8kb, 16kb, 32kb, 64kb) since the files are typically larger and more frequently accessed/written than the normal home user/non-creative?

thanks again,

- Sam

[singularity2006]

I found that leaving the pagefile on C gave me a better performance gain. I would reduce your cache drive to just 1GB for temporary internet files and temporary system files. If anything, I would do it all this way:

(for the 200)
C: 10GB
D: 1GB
E: everything left over

(for the 150)
F: storage of files (try to keep your stores on a single drive to prevent headache organizing later.

And as for your cluster size question, cluster size should be 4K for partitions larger than 2GB. Anything lower can take smaller ones but for the most part NTFS is optimized well enough that 4K is ok. As I recall, NTFS doesn't like it if you try to use larger or smaller cluster sizes when partitions get large. FAT32 gives you more flexibility in that respect but is much less reliable than NTFS because of that flexibility (sort of a trade off).

Lastly, there probably is a way to change the default install folder but I have yet to look myself. The main issue is that it is automatically created on a clean install of Windows anyway so creating a new install folder will only be for all future apps since moving the apps from C to E would really mess things up if not done properly.

Hope that helps, and have good luck!

[Somhairle]

Thanks for the feedback singularity2006!

I've set up my new hard disk pretty much as you said. kudos!

Motherboard Control Tune-Up

Nearing the end, I bring up a small tweak that some people find handy. This modification reduces the wait states between device calls on the motherboard between the RAM, AGP, and PCI slots. To begin, please startup the registry editor (as shown in the above sections) and browse the following key string: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\VxD\BIOS and input the following DWORD values and make their data values equal to “1”:

* PCIConcur
* AGPConcur
* FastDRAMI can't see the end part of that key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\BIOS

I'm running xp pro (sp2). do I need to add those last values manualy? or are they different for xp? (sorry if this was asked/answered already)

thanks again.

[singularity2006]

Yes, you must create those keys manually. Have fun! (:

[Somhairle]

thanks again singularity2006....did all the tweaks bar "documents and settings". a bit worried about getting back into windows after restart:
Mind you, that you must transfer your profiles over before you log off. Otherwise you'll be in a whole world of hurt when you log back on.I tried your setup in post #93 about changing the C:\User documents and settings\ manualy to another drive. I got errors when I tried to copy over the Documents and Settings to my selected drive. I restarted and booted via F8. this copied over MY user settings, but the errors poped up again for Administrator (not suprising as I was using the admin account)...so I changed the reg line back to c:\

is there any particluar method of transfering the profiles? (ie: my documents > Properties > Target (WinXP) sets my documents to another user-defined folder/drive and copies the files over once you hit apply.)

I didn't want to chance it without getting some more feedback from you. Also, This change has to be done BEFORE any programs are installed...correct?

AH! and lastly....although I followed your guides 100% the page file on C:\ is 2gbs (which is the same as my physical ram) ....in the reg my setting is:

Name: PagingFiles
Type: REG_MULTI_SZ
Data: C:\pagefile.sys 2 512

(set via Performance options > advanced > virtual memory)

any reason as to why its a constant 2gb? thanks again! :)

[singularity2006]

I'm honestly not too sure about the transfer of user files since I've never done it myself. The only thing I can think of is to make sure that Windows is showing all files including system files. I recall trying to copy files before while duplicating a drive and it wouldn't take the boot sector. Lots of issues surrounding that. The only other thing I can think of is to take out the hard drive and move the user profiles to another drive that way so Windows doesn't complain that the file is locked (that is assuming locked files are your cause of error).

As for the 2GB, I've never seen that happen before. Did you restart your computer after the change was made?

[Somhairle]

hi again,

I'm just gonna leave the user settings on C....until I see a sure fire way of changing it. I always back up my user settings eitherways - so thats no biggy. I'll just resize C:/ to 10gb as you said. thanks for the feedback and quick reply! :buttrock:

well, as for the 2gb page file....yep, I restarted = the same size.

BTW: With all of your tweaks its running very smoothly. an average of 48 secs from initial startup to workable desktop (and that's with norton AV and nVidia Forceware) :drool: ......speaking of norton...anyone find its very stressfull on the HDD? (not with this setup, But in my previous "typical user" setups it was so SLOW (boot) and seemed nearly like it was *grinding* the HDD on startup!)

EDIT: I set the minimum page file to 128 instead of the quoted "2" in xp. 2 didn't work as expected for some reason (?) and seemed that xp defaulted back to its "normal" page file size.

I've read most of the articles you posted (GREAT reference!) http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php is nice and straight to the point. so I've set my page file to 128 - 1024 (it shouldn't have any problems with the "ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 1")

I'd like to personally thank you for sharing this information - its something I'll take away with me for a long time!

- Sam

[singularity2006]

yeah, I know how painful Norton can be. The only thing I can do is just not use it. Actually, I only use AntiVirus. I use ExecSoft's Diskeeper Pro for disk maintenance and Winguide's Registry Mechanic. And to top it off when absolutely necessary, I put on Microsoft AntiSpyware. But that's only when absolutely necessary.

[Somhairle]

EDIT:

Changing the default documents and settings folder:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q236621/

- Sam

[singularity2006]

i just love it when they say, "may lead to catastrophic system problems" :scream:

[singularity2006]

it's been like 3 years since I last updated this thing - literally. Hope this new version is easier to read. New pictures coming soon! :]

[Somhairle]

HOOT!

great to see the updates chuck!!!

- Sam

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