XP on Steroids Part 1

1. Shutdown Speed

By altering a several registry settings, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes for Windows to shut down. To do this, first open up the registry editor and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop

Once there, find the value HungAppTimeout and make sure it is set to 5000 (that's the default). Now, in the same folder, look for the value WaitToKillAppTimeout. Set this to 4000 (the default is 20000).

Then navigate to the folder

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControl

and change the value WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 4000 as well. Another thing that helps speeding up shutting down is going to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services and then setting the NVidia Driver Help service to Manual.

2. Setting DMA Mode on IDE Drives

For some reason, Windows XP sometimes sets itself to use a PIO transfer mode on IDE channels instead of the DMA mode. If this is the case, you can manually set the IDE channel to DMA mode, which will reduce the amount of CPU cycles being used on that device. To set this, go to Device Manager (press Windows-Break, or right click 'My Computer' -> Properties, then go to the Hardware tab, then finally click 'Device Manager'), then open up the branch labelled 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers'. Now, double click on 'Primary IDE Channel' and go to Advanced Settings.

and check the Transfer Mode scroll boxes. Set them all to DMA If Available, then click OK. Continue to do this for each IDE Controller, and you should be right.

3. The XP Prefetcher

With Windows XP comes a service called the Prefetcher. This service monitors which programs initialize when Windows boots, then in future, fetches them quickly. The Prefetcher is enabled by default, but you can improve its performance. Simply navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters

in the registry and find the value EnablePrefetcher. Most likely, it will be set to 3. The recommended setting for the prefetcher is 5, and that's what works best for me. Feel free to play around with it a bit, though, and find out what works best for you.

It is possible to disable the Prefetcher by setting the value to 0, but the only reasons you might want to do this is if you wanted to test a machine in a lab environment.

4. ZIP Folders

A really quick tweak... Windows XP has built-in support for .ZIP files, so that you can view them as normal folders. However, the system uses a sizeable portion of resources doing this, so disabling this feature can increase performance. It's easy to do, you just have to un-register the zipfldr.dll, by going to Start -> Run... and typing

regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll

then pressing Enter.

5. Unloading DLLs

Explorer often caches DLL files in memory for a period of time after they have finished being used. This can result in large amounts of memory being taken up by DLL files that are not even being used. To stop this happening, navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion
Explorer

Now, you have to create a new sub-key called AlwaysUnloadDLL with a default value of 1.

If you want to disable this tweak, just delete the key. Note: Windows has to restart for this tweak to take effect.

6. Hibernation

Another really quick and easy tweak - if you're not going to be using Hibernation (as most people don't), make sure it is disabled, as Windows reserves an amount of Hard Drive space equal to that of your RAM for hibernation. To disable Hibernation, go to Control Panel -> Power Options -> Hibernate Tab.

Jan 29 - 07:47 PM PT  |  filed under Speed Up XP  |   Printer-friendly version