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Simple Tweak to Speed Up Applications in Windows XP

gilsmethod.com — "The tweak I am going to describe below does several things. First it increase system stability by instructing the operating system to seperate processes for each instanace of an application. In other words if you have three Word documents open and one of them crashes it will alow you to close out that crashed instance of Word..."

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  • bunnytrigger, on 10/12/2007, -47/+11can anybody testify for this tweak??? i dugg it so its easy to find in case it is
    • rekrapt, on 10/12/2007, -41/+10This can help... but, obviously, the more processes you run, the more your system is tasked.
    • rolosworld, on 10/12/2007, -251/+20the simplest way to speed up winXP apps is to use them on Linux with wine...
    • bigred, on 10/12/2007, -9/+30The real question, do you change it to 0x38 or 38?
      There's a slight difference between hex 38 and decimal 38.
    • icefrakker, on 10/12/2007, -16/+168the quickest way to show you're an asshole is bitch about linux when the topic is about windows.
    • damentz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+53Sooooo innacurate! What this guy tells you to set the priority to is also the default, 2. And the separate process tweak only effects EXPLORER windows. By loading then im separate processes instead of in the same thread, if one crashes, it doesnt take the rest in the same thread. And if you dont use explorer for excessive file managing it doesnt matter how much ram you have for this "tweak"

      As for the process tweak, heres the math
      Foreground to Background ratio;
      3:1 add 2
      2:1 add 1
      1:1 add 0

      Lengths of the quanta to be;
      Variable lengths, add 4
      Fixed lengths, add 8

      Intervals of the quanta to be;
      Shorter, add 32
      Longer, add 16

      38 = 3 to 1 ratios, Variable length, Short interval.

      The value of 2 is used as a reserve, sort of like a preset to 38 to make it simpler.
    • hello2usir, on 10/12/2007, -3/+33This is ridiculous. There is no registry key that will make all of your programs magically start splitting into different instances.

      When you start a Windows program, Windows will always give it its own process. At that point it's up to the application to decide what to do. Some continue to run, while some check for a previous instance, pass control to it, and close. It is entirely dependent on how the application was written.
    • Sblader5, on 10/12/2007, -17/+7for some reason this is already done on my machine... weird.
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@Sblader5
      My machine also has this "tweak" on it. I am running windows x64 Pro. I have also done atleast two other "tweak" guides but, i dont think that it was in any of those. I have also run multiple apps that claim to make windows faster (ex. Inteli hyperspeed 2005, game thruster, ect.) so those might have also applied it.
    • rolosworld, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1well... seems I'm right, speed up windows applications on windows is inaccurate...
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12Nothing will fix Windows. Nothing.
  • TheContinental0, on 10/12/2007, -47/+11Looks to be rather niche oriented. I can't think of any applications which I run numerous instances of at any given time. I guess this might be useful to those stuck in the stone age of browsers that don't support tabs.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -6/+54See your problem resides in the fact that apparently all you do with a computer is browse the internet.
    • ufia, on 10/12/2007, -10/+26"See your problem resides in the fact that apparently all you do with a computer is browse the internet."

      Wrong! All I do with a computer is playing Solitaire. I never browse the internet.
    • ScottMaximus, on 10/12/2007, -23/+6Don't all the leet haxors play Solitare?
    • boomerxl, on 10/12/2007, -16/+7Yeah, my Solitare lets me post to Digg too!
    • topato, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14The Legend of Sol Taire is a battle simulator, designed for only the most elite of warriors.

      Solitare = Serious Buisness
    • jiub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5the real question is who doesn't play 9 simultaneous games of solitaire?
    • SmeRndmGy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5The internet? They have that on computers now?
  • milomilomilo, on 10/12/2007, -19/+12Almost entirely useless, as running apps in multipe instances rarely happens with anything other word processing, spreadsheets and such.

    It helps cpu time, but eats your ram alive.

    No digg
    • chime, on 10/12/2007, -13/+8Actually multiple Explorer windows and IE6 windows take a lot more ram than you'd realize. Despite what people say, Explorer or IE6 rarely crash on any of the 30-35 XP systems I admin. So for all of them, this setting is disabled.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -18/+17Running dual and triple screens at home and work, I often find the need to have multiple excel docs open and its nice to have them split up among the screens. I have on occasion run into problems because i cannot have them on separate screens unless i use UltraMon and span the excel program across the monitors and lay out the spreadsheets by hand... this is a royal PITA.

      This tweak would be nice to have. So not entirely useless.

      Useless to you is not necessarily useless to everyone else
    • Dylan16807, on 10/12/2007, -12/+6Do you have a really old version, or has it changed in the last year or so?
      Even 2000 separate windows for each open document.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -10/+10Yes it makes seperate windows, but drag ONE window to another monitor, it moves all of the open windows to that same monitor.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -9/+12HMM, I thought because I'm getting dugg down for my comment and Dylan16807 is being dugg back up that maybe I was wrong, but i tested it again in Office 2003 2 seperate books only occupy 1 excel instance, and I am NOT able to drag them seperately between the monitors...

      Why am I being dugg down, for being correct?
    • barakatx2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13thats how it works on digg
    • popfrogs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@Mesach: Because you never went into the preferences and told Excel to open more than a single instance per file. Trust me, the setting is there, and it's VERY useful for some people.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There is no feature in Tools >> options that will allow you to do what
  • n0sferatu, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5Internet Explorer is the only thing I can think off off-hand. If there is a nasty infinite pop-up in one instance and you need to close it down, this tweak would save you from having all other IE windows closed as well. A better solution though is to just Opera or Firefox (with IETab).
  • crexor, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9can anyone say firefox + memory leak, this "tweak" is very handy for instances such as this, and naysayers for "eats your ram alive" . I use tabs on firefox, and still open multiple windows, one window with digg/all front page/spy stories tabbed, the other window with email, the other with things such as my webmin frontend to my Ultra60 and other misc things in it. Maybe its time to move into the 21st century of computing, 1gig of ram can be had for under 50 dollars, and trust me its worth it, maybe forgo the trip to dominos pizza for 2 nights, and upgrade.
  • proudcanadian, on 10/12/2007, -6/+18There are so many "tweaks" and "hacks" out there to speed up XP, and most of them dont do a thing. I have learned that sometimes leaving it how it was is best. Lets face it, there must be a reason that a coder in Microsoft made it the way it is.
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -6/+20Yeah, because his deadline had been pushed back so many times that they are forcing them to write it as is, so that they will meet thier final deadline
    • jaems, on 10/12/2007, -17/+6Furthermore, if all their coding/setting were perfect, than Windows would never crash, and no one would be able to exploit the OS through viruses.

      Default != Perfection
    • Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9reason = os has to run on lowest common denominator machines
    • Gir1337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Using the same logic, there must have been a reason that Microsoft left in all those simple security vulnerabilities. One such example is nolmhash. Set it to 1, for god's sake. It's there to store the password as an LM hash and an NTLM has. NTML hash is much harder to crack than the lm hash because it has a lot "salting" if you will (seemingly random digits in the hash). LM hash is only used by Windows 98 and down I believe. Can brute force those puppies pretty quick ^_^
    • thefinger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1'out of the box', xp is setup to reflect what MS thinks is the lowest common denominator

      there are some tweaks that really do work
      however this isn't one of them
  • steely, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13"maybe forgo the trip to dominos pizza for 2 nights, and upgrade"

    Maybe put your kid in cloth diapers for a couple weeks, and upgrade.
    • stuffhappens, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Reusable nappies or disposables? No difference, says green report

      Lucy Ward, social affairs correspondent
      Thursday May 19, 2005
      The Guardian

      Parents trying to do their bit for the planet by pinning their infants into reusable nappies might as well have been using disposables, according to a report published yesterday.

      A study by the Environment Agency into the environmental impact of disposable and reusable nappies found there was "little or nothing to choose between them".

      The drain on the environment in terms of raw material use and energy of manufacturing disposables and dealing with the waste was equal to the impact of generating energy to run washing machines and dryers for cloth nappies, the report concluded.
    • rhizome, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Though they both have an impact, I'd say there's a difference between consuming energy by operating machines and consuming slightly less energy and replacing it with piles of plastic-covered paper towels smeared with *****.

      Maybe I'm weird, though.
  • hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10http://support.microsoft.com/?id=102987
    According to that, what is being said is wrong.
    • suspect23, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4The article you linked to does not have sufficient explanation of the key to determine that this hack is "wrong". Here is an explaination from another page that has the hack as a suggested performance tweak (http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html):


      "This tweak is impossible to explain without getting into the technical ins and outs of binary values, bit pairs and bit masks. Suffice it to say, it forces short, variable length processor timeslices to be allocated to foreground processes three times more often than those timeslices given to background processes."

    • suspect23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I never said that the setting improves anything. All I said was that, the fact that its not listed on MS's KB article does not make it "wrong" as in an invalid entry. Not all features of Windows are documented by MS.

      But since I'm already dugg down -- you guys are ***** if you're trusting a random article on dugg for a performance tweak in the first place.
  • jgreene777, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1I wonder if it will allow me to separate the instances of my CAD app by running one instance with one dongle and another instance with the other dongle so that I get all the features allowed by the two dongles on the same machine...
  • Jhero, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2so is it hex 38 or decimal 38
    • Larke2000, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2i've seen this before. 38 refers to a decimal value.
    • wharlie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Its decimal 38, hex 26.
      You can do the same by clicking "Programs" then apply in "Processor Scheduling" in "My Computer - Performance Options".
      Its weird because MS set it in the registry to default of 2 but when you use the GUI as above it changes it to 38 even though the GUI doesn't tell you this.
      If you want to see it happen, open have regedit open while you change it in the GUI, make sure to refresh regedit to see the changes.
      The GUI is a lot safer, especially for people not familiar with the registry, I don't know what affect hex 38 would have on your PC, if someone wants to try go ahead.

  • Jhero, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3Ok, so I hex becomes 26 and decimal becomes 38?
  • DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Please mod the article as innacurate and don't mess your system up with this hack. If you want to optimize Windows XP for *user programs* (not processes) there is an option provided in the System control panel, and it's set this way by default. There is no such thing as "optimizing for processes". Think about it: If your programs are already taking 100% CPU time there is no more CPU you can allocate to them. The option in the System control panel does let you ask Windows to prefer user programs over services, though.

    As for opening folder windows in a new process, that only affects explorer (the Windows shell). It will have no effect on your other software whatsoever, except that if you have this option on and there are many explorer Windows open you may have less free physical memory available because each copy of the process will need it's own heap/stack.
  • timro, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1AIM without linking sn's or using two versions anyone? That is, if this does work.
  • artanis, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7This guy has no idea what he's talking about. That seperate processes per folder option is EXPLORER ONLY. The priority hack will not speed up application load or even run speed. Article fails miserably, buried.
  • Starcom, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1There is a much simpler way to do this. Open an explorer window, then:

    Tools>Folder Options>View, then check Launch folder windows in a seperate process

    It says folder windows, but it does it for all programs including explorer.
    • artanis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4No, it doesn't.
    • daedal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4As far as I know, and I might be wrong on this, but all that option does is separate each Explorer window as a different processes so if one crashes or ceases to respond, it doesn't bring down all the other ones with it.
    • Starcom, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0Yeah it does do that for explorer.

      Well, maybe it doesn't work on everything, but it has saved windows when i terminated a process for some other programs like Word, IE when I use it, and some other stuff. Either way, its still a simpler and safer way to do the same thing as opposed to the article.
  • wharlie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Here's an article from 2002 that goes into more detail.
    http://redmondmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=405
  • Meka181, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2No digg copied of forum with out giving at least some credit.
    http://www.tech-faq.com/forum/increase-cpu-priority-113.html
  • themeparkphoto, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5This "article" is pure nonsense, probably written by some Apple zealot trying to spread rumors that Windows XP doesn't run processes in their own protected memory space. Pure bunk.
  • digitallysick, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3I have the problem at work, i have a bunch of windows opens (ie) when one freezes, it takes out explorer.exe causeing everything opened in it, to crash, to bad there is not a way around it
    • Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5There is, its called Firefox, Opera, or any of the numerous other browsers.
    • Bensch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Except that when Firefox goes down, it takes every single FF window out with it.
  • Wezlanator, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4This tweak slowed down my computer.

    Reported as inaccurate.
  • TheEditor1, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5The thing that I find most ironic in the Windows world is that most of the people that come up with these "performance" improvements are the same ones that bitch that Windows is so unstable. Well talking from experience I can say that I have had Windows systems that were quite stable. I worked for a company that ran Windows NT 4.0 server and used the resources of them quite heavily, file sharing, SQL, printer sharing, authentication, etc and I can, and the owners of the company can, attest to the fact that the machines run flawlessly for quite sometime. I had one NT 4.0 server that ran MS SQL 7.0 that ran perfectly for over a year without a reboot and the only reason for the machine to be shut off was to move it to a different room. And before anyone says, "well it must not have gotten much use" and makes a complete ass of themselves I have to say that the machine handled ten of thousands of SQL transactions per day.

    Now, how can it be that these machines were that stable. We didn't ***** with them and try and tweak opne area of the system without understanding how it affected another area of the system. They just ran and stayed stable.
    • robbyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I agree with your point, but perhaps if microsoft gave a bit more info on what options such as this actually do, people wouldn't try to feel their way around in the dark?
    • thefinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'd dearly love to find the little bed wetters who dugg you down for your comment
  • motivr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3most of those xp "tweaks" cause some side effects or don't improve performance noticeably. Why would'nt MS include those "tweaks" via Windows Updates / Service Pack if those were that good? 99% of XP tweaks are worthless IMO. except for the famous TCP/IP tweak. (although this one also has some side effects depend on connection type)
  • dupswapdrop, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1nice link to a scan and spam site
  • Nero51, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0"except for the famous TCP/IP tweak."
    (And so curiosity strikes) What TCP/IP tweak? :p
    • artanis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4MS hardcoded a connection limit into tcpip.sys. They capped the number of connections you can open over a certain number of seconds, trying to prevent viruses from spreading as fast... except it affects more than just viruses, bittorrent for one. (maybe the only one?)
    • Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are patches that work perfectly to overcome this "fix".
  • guttertrash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4its so funny the stuff that gets to front page. i think people should haf to pass a minimum iq test before being given authority to digg/submit.
    • thefinger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2including the so called elite diggers
  • jimmsta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This tweak is utter and complete BS. The only real Windows Tweak is a fresh install. There is NOTHING that you can do to improve the performance on your hardware.

    The only 'tweaks' that I recommend, at all, is cleanup of temp files/folders periodically, and wiping of the Prefetch folder after 2-3 months. A defrag never hurts either.

    Just my two cents.
    • thefinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0leave prefetch alone

      xp manages it well enough on its own
      you'll get a performance drop if you clear that folder, though a temporary drop

      it's another one of those bs xp myths that have been floating around for years
  • Viral, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Personally, this will actually help me at work as 95% of what I do is directly through Explorer. I'm unable to use any alternate browser for the majority of what I need and Explorer tends to crash at LEAST once a day, which if nothing else seriously cheeses me off. I generally have a good dozen instances open just for ease of access and immediacy, and if I can save the other 11 from crapping out on me all the better.

    But this is so not dugg. I'd rather not provide any further encouragement to those who need not ***** with their system.

    Very basic advice here...... LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE!
    • bury, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You're not confusing Windows Explorer with Internet Explorer, are you?
      You mention alternate browser, and unless that means file browser, I think you confused which Explorer they mean.
    • Viral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Everything mentioned here refers to Internet Explorer, but either way they're one and the same when it comes right down to it. You can't really uninstall IE, since it's part of the Windows shell. You can change/update the version, but not much else. The base program is always there.
  • Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Will this improve my gas mileage?
  • JeffH, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2HELP!

    I changed it to 38 without reading, what was the default value?
  • Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Where the F$%K did 38 come from?
    Here are the actual usable values and what they mean.

    0 Foreground and background applications equally responsive
    1 Foreground application more reponsive than background
    2 Best foreground application response time

    They are easily changed other ways besides regedit.

    I would theorize that if you put an invalid value such as 38 into the field Windows defaults to a value, probably 2, to maintain OS operation.

    I hate these ***** tweaks people post.
    It would be nice to just flat BAN people who do this.
  • Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2System Properties > Advanced > Performance - Settings Button > Advanced.

    This option allows you to easily switch between Priority 1 and 2. As far as I can tell priority 0 is undocumented.
  • Burritovision, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0examine www.timetravelisforsuckers.blogspot.com for a few tips on cpu usage! maybe your machine can go faster. numerous factory software de-tweaks seem standard. =(
  • kaboegel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0according to my local voodoo witch singing 'always look on the bright side of life' backwards while starting up Windows makes it run 20-40% faster
  • gilsmethod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I apologize for the typo on the article with regards to the hexadecimal value, corrections were made on the article - I also included some sources that cite this specific tweaks functionality. Thanks for the feedback!
  •  

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