What is Digg?113 Comments
- OmegaNine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+63http://duggmirror.com/software/Want_a_faster_Windows_XP_Here_s_how/
- wurzelgummage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+55dugg for not having any of the more popular "tweaks" that definitely decrease performance.
- joeydoo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+35This a better page...... The ONLY XP tweak page you ever will need to look at. And it explains why half of the "tweaks" on this article are myths.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+33Here's to guessing I'll spend more time applying the tweaks than I will ever save.
- RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30"1GB of corsair RAM killed and a corrupt HDD... WTF. I then spent the next few depressing days trying to fix it only to have to do a new install."
And XP destroyed your hardware? Perhaps it's the hardware that sent XP off into continual reboots, infact it's not perhaps, it's a sure thing. - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27....and it's exactly comments like these that give Linux users bad names. Thanks for setting us back.
- zengonzo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+24Quit being a crank.
- Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+21your blaming windows for your ram exploding?
- Pooley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17How about a tip to make your web server run faster? You need it.
- CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -5/+21Leo, uninstall life.
- tsupersonic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Yes, these are some of the more uncommon tweaks that improve performance. There's also more you can do to keep your computer clean and fast, you know the usual stuff: scan your computer for viruses and spyware regularly. You can use Ccleaner to clear unwanted files, msconfig to remove startup programs, use bootvis to improve startup times. These are the "tweaks" we see often on digg.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Want a faster Windows? Don't install software you don't need.
- moke, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13I was actually waiting who will write this comment first .... Leo55 you win.
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I don't think this is a very good idea. Why not just let windows close programs gracefully? By reducing the kill time you run the risk of corrupting files and losing unsaved work.
Of all the things to speed up, is shutdown one of them? Just click Shut Down, turn off your monitor, and walk away.
It's best to never turn off your computer though. PCs use very little electricity, and shutting it off changes the temperature of the sensitive components dramatically. Regularly turning your computer on and off changes the heat which expands and contracts the tiny electronic connections which become less and less in contact the more times you cut the power. If you want to save electricity just turn off your monitor. That's the biggest power drain. - jabberwonk, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12@treelovinhippie
"1GB of corsair RAM killed"
I'm no WinFanBoy - I use XP on my desktops, and manage BSD and some Linux servers for an ISP. But, can anyone explain to me how an O/S can cause physical damage to RAM? It sounds to me more like you took a surge through your cable or DSL - I've certainly seen that do physical damage to RAM and cause a HD to become corrupt.
There are plenty of things to blame Windows for, but damaging hardware is probably not one of them. - ayeroxor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"a blessing to your system â??s speed""
<off-topic rant>
WHEN IS DIGG GOING TO FIX THE "â??s" ISSUE?!
</off-topic rant> - krinthekuz, on 09/16/2008, -5/+11"H. MAKE YOUR MENUS LOAD FASTER" is a perfect example of a bad tweak. when you set the number lower than the default, unless you have a godly fast comp, it slows to ***** because any (even slight) mouseover of a menu folder makes the menu want to pop out. moving throughout the menu becomes unusably slow.
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@treelovinhippie
This is the uptime of my WinXP box before I sadly had to reboot it.
http://hyppy.zapto.org/uptime.jpg - okravetz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's a bit more reading, granted (175 pages as of the latest version), but I think there is no substitute for TweakGuide's Tweaking Companion (http://www.tweakguides.com/). As much like an ad as this may sound, I still have to mention it. My computer has never been happier since I followed TweakGuides amazingly awesome instructions. So take a look...digg it...whatever.
Just thought I'd recommend it to those diggers who don't yet know of it's wicked awesomeness. - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6BTW, here is the command to check your windows uptime:
c:windowssystem32systeminfo | find "Up Time"
Or if you installed Windows to a nonstandard directory:
%windir%system32systeminfo | find "Up Time"
I put this command in a batch file and saved it to my desktop. Press a key to close the window. Here's the code:
@echo off
c:windowssystem32systeminfo | find "Up Time"
pause
BASH users will cringe at Windows' usage of find :) - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It automatically detected that your Windows XP installation is fast enough already.
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6The only thing that slowed down for me when I disabled indexing was hard disk searches. Indexing builds a table of contents of files on the hard drive. The speed performance gained is by easing up on disk access, not on memory. Hard drives are just about the slowest part of every personal computer in the past 25 years. See my 60-day uptime post above for proof that my XP box is stable with indexing disabled.
That's why it's also a good idea to turn off NTFS last access logging. There's really no need to flag every accessed file. - dubloe7, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5anyone have any information on if the tcp/ip optimiser thing works?
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@LucasVB
You can mess around with the swap file pretty freely without worrying about breaking anything permanently. Worst case scenario is that Windows will pop up a dialog saying there isn't enough virtual memory and it may have to close an app.
I think the article's swap file tweak could use some elaboration though.
For those with more than 512MB of RAM (that had better be everyone here) the best results will be had by those with at least 2 physical drives. Put at least a 256MB swap file on your system drive (usually drive C) and put a 768MB swap file on any partition on the other physical drive. The system swap file is just to keep Windows from freaking out (some stupid programs assume swap is on C) and the speed benefit of putting the main page file on another drive, even a slow one, is huge.
Furthermore, when setting a custom swap file size make sure the minimum and maximum sizes are the same. This forces Windows to create the non-variable swap file immediately in one big chunk. Variable page files are constantly being created and destroyed which causes lots of fragmentation and slows things down immensely. - UrsusMorologus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It doesn't work with XP. It was a Win95/98 setting that is not used by XP at all.
- bobbknight, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Doods, this is what you want.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041123023608/www.blackviper.com/index.html - Xiata, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Indexing service is used to index the the hard drives contents for search purposes. The only windows APIs that are influenced by whether or not this service is enabled is the Search functionality.
So if you don't use search often (read: daily), it is a trivial waste of hard drive seeks and cpu time to run it. Disable it if you do not search for things often. You are not getting a performance increase browsing folders-- the ntfs mft is being queried for folder/file data when any application tries to open files.
Or better yet, get an indexer that tends to index things in a better manner, such as Google Desktop or Yahoo's... whatever it is called. - DigitalDud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's notable that Vista changes this value to 1000.
- swaxhog, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I have to disagree that disabling swap hurts performance. If the applications you run never cause you to use more physical ram than you have, disable swap. I run with no swap and never have out of memory problems and I no longer have uneccesary disk access to the page file to allocate memory that will be needed everytime I run an app.
- UrsusMorologus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You probably turned off clear-type
- skyspine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I haven't had XP crash on me in over three years, and even then it was Home edition. In fact, I had my old HP laptop on continually for an 8-month stretch, running Maya, Photoshop, Flash, etc on a daily basis. My current uptime on my desktop is somewhere around 45 days.
- hurfydurfur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Slow down on insulting digg. Escape backslashes.
For example: "I run C:\WINDOWS> to play games, I run Unix which taught me how PHP escapes \. And newlines in OSX are escaped the same way with \".
If you have ever written a database app, backslashes, quotes, newlines and all the special characters cause a crazy number of problems. Digg runs on lamp.
Try: \\ I type four backslashes but you will see 2. When you type two, we will see one. When you type one, we see zero. - LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually, these are mostly good tweaks. I wouldn't recommend messing with memory or swap files without further research, but the registry tweaks to reduce delays make all the difference and are pretty safe too.
@djlosch: you probably set the delay to zero. That's a bad thing to do. 100-200 ms is usually faster, but not excessive. - DigitalDud, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Placebo effect.
- nocode, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@treelovinhippie... I've never really had a problem with XP before. It'll usually be a program or something bogus running on my computer. I'll usually go to a restore point or boot up on the "Last Known Configuration" and my computer will usually be fine.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've used powertoys since day 1 to get rid of the stupid .5 second delay when mousing over a folder in the start menu. There is NO slowdown on any of the system I've used it on (well over 100 I would estimate) and everybody has commented along the lines of "Wow, windows is much faster" even when its only the menus that are.
- gincarnated, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I used it and pages seem to be loading noticeably quicker. But the bold text on websites seem to be pixely. I'm not really sure if the tcp/ip optimiser caused this or one of the other tweaks that I used.
I used all of them and I have to say I am quite pleased. - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Digg, a ***** tech news site, can't display blackslashes in commandline code?!?!
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3My parents have 3 user accounts on their XP box and all 3 are constantly logged on in the background - i.e., they switch users without logging off. They get 100% CPU just fine.
What kind of processor do you have? If you have a Pentium with hyperthreading you might only be using one virtual core at a time which is perfectly normal. - mmortal03, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Most of those are good optimizations. I have used them before, and they are fairly well known, and useful.
The one that may not actually work is: J. IMPROVE SWAPFILE PERFORMANCE, which deals with turning on ConservativeSwapfileUsage. I think I heard it before that doing this actually decreases performance. - BobMysterioso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Uptime is just not responsibly possible anymore.
Back in Win2k I had huge 4 or 5 month uptimes. During that time there would 1 or 2 updates. Now, with XP there are so many freaking updates.
Right now, my work box has an uptime of 4 days. There are 10 freaking updates. Some of that is Windows Update from the WSUS server, but still.. thats a lot of updates.
So, 60 days uptime, good job.. too bad your box is horribly unpatched. - silkysaul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Thank you! This is one of the reason why OEM prebuilt Windows installs are slower than a fresh clean XP install.
It makes it even worst when people add more applications along with the prebuilt bloatware. - subbzzz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5http://duggmirror.com
- iChainsaw, on 10/27/2007, -0/+1opposed to leaving it on all the time, exposing it to regular wear and tear as well as being exposed to heat?
- UrsusMorologus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2What's the consensus on the ConservativeSwapfileUsage setting in system.ini, and is there another way to do it (would like to set this in AD policy for all machines). I really hate the way windows starts swapping before half the RAM is used.
- Himself, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Xiata:
use AgentRansack instead - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2That's really interesting to hear that it works for you. I suppose I retract my statement not to try this at all, but use caution.
- serpentor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I've been running without a pagefile since having 512MB of RAM, a good 4-5 years. I only needed to upgrade to 2GB of RAM to run Battlefield 2 with no pagefile. For just gaming, Firefox, VLC Player, word/excel, I've never had a problem running XP without a pagefile.
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Also, run the desktop either at 32 or 16 bit colour. 24 bit is not a native setting and puts more strain on the CPU.
- H2SO4, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3cd
cd windows
cd system32
systeminfo | find "Up Time"
pause -
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