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Readers have reported that this story contains information that may not be accurate.144 Comments
- quadvods, on 10/12/2007, -2/+42WARNING
I just tried this out on my SP2 machine (512mb ram) - It totally messed it up, when I rebooted after the tweak it said it didn't have the resources to create a local user profile, after that it said there was a problem with my licensing - it wouldn't let me log in, so I had to reboot again, hit F8 and restore my pc to before I did the tweak to get it to work again. - WackyT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30"How did this ever get on Digg? Apparently no one does any research."
http://www.gibberishtalk.com/showpost.php?s=7d1db230e0b09a6663136b0eeb4d78fa&p=371&postcount=6
Right on the nose, Mastertech. Digg seems to be all about myths and rumors, and very minimal true testing. - doublebackslash, on 10/12/2007, -3/+25Linux's MONOLITHIC kernel is only a few megs and is always in memory. Windows is (not entirely accurately) referred to as a micro kernel, and is usually much smaller. Tell me, how is 512 to little?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I want to know. - BigFoot48, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22Placebo effect?
- bill.clark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Concerning Bootvis
from Microsoft's Site:
About Bootvis.exe
"Bootvis.exe is a performance tracing and visualization tool that Microsoft designed to help PC system designers and software developers identify performance issues for boot/resume timing while developing new PC products or supporting software.
Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system." - atdigg, on 10/12/2007, -9/+24it might be 6 years oldn but for some people is (good) new info.
- boza111, on 10/12/2007, -9/+23I don't see why people like you "complain" that it has been known since 6 years. I am sure it has been known since windows was out. But a lot of people don't know about things like that !
Or maybe you just feel special that you knew this for 6 years. We are all proud of you ! - UnderLoK, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17"This one is the best tweak for windows I ever found, and it works very well
Here is what you have to do :
1) Open the regedit tool (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe )
2) Use the navigation in the left and go to HKEY LOCAL MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management
3) Double click the DisablePagingExecutive attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
This will make the drivers and the XP kernel run in memory.
4) Double click the LargeSystemCache attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
This will improve performance of the kernel
5) Double click the IOPageLockLimit attribute. On some later versions of windows XP that doesn't exists, so if this is the case you're done Otherwise you have to put to the hex value : 4000 for pcs with 128 mb ram, 10000 for 256 mb ram and if you have more put 40000. This value specifies how many bytes can be used for I/O operations in your system.
That's it, enjoy "
Working for me... - Forgery, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15If you read the comments at the bottom of the article, a poster points out that the registry hacks listed are actually MYTHS and will NOT improve anything.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html - gklitt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I think this is called the power of suggestion...people do something to make their machine "faster" and wow it seems faster.
- danpsmith, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16512 is far too little ram to load the entire kernel into memory and have any memory left over
- danpsmith, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13the kernel can obviously be paged just like anything else
virtual memory works just like regular memory, and windows tends to use a pagefile over physical ram all the time, if you are curious just check out your memory usage in the task manager and then check out the number of page faults in the processes tab... You'll see that you can have a lot of memory free and still a lot of page faults. One way around all of this is to load your pagefile into memory. - readme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9These can actually slow your system down in most cases and at best speed the system up slightly. DisablePagingExecutive is the only one I recommend and it's going to cost you more memory of course, which is going to make memory hogs like say Oblivion page more to disk when they max out your physical RAM, thus making everything slower.
Use with caution and don't expect magic performance boosts from one registry setting. - uptown, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11what's his name?
- matx, on 10/12/2007, -7/+16Is it me or shouldnt the kernel always be in memory, with out kernel in memory how is the operating system going to work!
- BitwiseMcgee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I swear, people hear the terms 'registry' and 'tweak' together, and they think they have a ticket to double the performance or some such nonsense.
Would Microsoft really ship an OS in that adding a 1 to a registry entry would improve things? No, because the vast majority of the uses for their OS won't see an advantage of that tweak. Sure, there are tweaks that can help in certain areas, but it's important to know /why/ the tweaks help, so you don't just blindly add them, and then counteract the 30 other tweaks you've added.
It's like when people think putting their page file in memory is bad ass fast... It just means you now limited the amount of ram you have, thus paging more, thus filling your page file in ram, thus jesus crying. - hometoast, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Or just make a 1GB RAMDISK! Then you have the fastestest swap file evar!
- dtm1017, on 10/12/2007, -6/+13why are you using sp1?
- mzkw, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I bet she's a very hot looking girl...
- spectre_25gt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7If you've been able to write an AI simulator, you should be able to follow the trail of logic and decide for yourself.
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Girlfriend know how to do registry tweaks? I'm jealous.
- Huze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Per this site, this is a myth:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
Not sure what to believe in this case. - fnot, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10"One way around all of this is to load your pagefile into memory."
Given you have loads of RAM. But it's totally contraproductive, you'd ***** the whole idea of virtual memory! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7When I start my older, slower systems, I just turn them on and walk away for a few minutes. Look out the window, get a cup of coffee, maybe visit with a colleague for a moment or two.
Since when is life so short that spending time tweaking windows to trim your boot time by a few seconds makes any sense?
Here's a tweak: Go out and buy a small potted plant. Whenever you boot your computer, look at the plant, see if it needs water... admire it.. pull off any dead growth... feel good about it... and before you know it, you're PC has booted up.
And the world is a better place.
et voila - Mike.ohara, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6doublebackslash: Some people are missinformed as to what a kernel actually is... some people assume thet by engaging this setting you are loading the entire running OS into memory. (Which would be a hell of lot). not just the OS MicroKernel.
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10This is stupid, reported as inaccurate. If you are that interested in trying to get minimal speed increase out of XP it time to get a new system. SATA helps a lot. As does faster memory and a better CPU. Really though, you can't make XP much faster through Reg tweaks. Sure a bunch added up can make a small but noticable improvement, but that's just part of optimizing any system. Want faster boot times? Don't shut down, hibernate. On a 7200 rpm SATA hard dtive (with a resonably fast system) I can "boot" from hibernation in 10 seconds. (oh and it's a dell !!!)
- tarheal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5All that I ask of noobs trying this reg hack, please please please back up your registry before you try this, move the backup to cd, diskette what ever, but have it just in case all goes wrong. I am presuming(not assuming) that most people who read DIGG are fairly technical and proficient enough to go mucking about in the registry, but if you are not comfortable doing so then DON'T. That is my two cents worth, and yes, this is a good reg tweak.
- clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Something you'll also notice the lack of is any kind of real proof. Just a bunch of "it is faster!" "if feels faster" "I think it worked" but no actual proof. Noone running a benchmark with a control system or side by side comparison... nothing. I wouldn't even bother with it unless it was going to make a big difference.
- ShapeGSX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It sucks when you go to do this, expecting a speedup, but you come to find out that you did it so long ago that you forgot all about it.
- BassCadet, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I want to let more people try this before I start mucking about...
- danpsmith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4it does it to leave memory for the ability to run more apps
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This "tweak" has been around for years. It only works if you have enough RAM. When it was first written, 1GB was excessive for most people. Today, if you play any recent 3D games, that means AT LEAST 2GB because those games take up close to a gig of RAM by themselves! So just keep that in mind, before you trash your Windows installation with this "tweak."
In any case, there's nothing magical about what this tweak does, it just has Windows load everything into RAM instead of using the HD. You could accomplish the same thing using a RAM disk or by using one of those very expensive new solid-state flash drives.
http://www.memtech.com/
This is a hack to accomplish nearly the same thing using ordinary RAM:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4We need some one knowledgeable on the subject to write an article and we'll digg it. The last few tweaks on Digg have ranged from uselss to quite dangerous
- modian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Agreed. I'd recommend using the NT backup utility:
start menu > run > ntbackup
click "advanced mode"
click "backup" tab
check "system state"
click the "browse" button
find a place to put the backup.
call it "registry backup" or something along those lines.
click "save"
click "start backup"
"backup job information" will pop up - click "start backup" again
fin! - legendxx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Not everyone searches the net every day for tweaks..
Im sorry you and your girlfriend cant find other things to do with your time. - jinexile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Take what you get off that website with a grain of salt too, this is maintained by the same guy that has been banned from digg for spamming his erroneous Firefox Myths page.
- fedira, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Wow, Genius, EVEN your girlfriend? If a girl can do it, then it MUST be totally obvious and simple!
- GlargTheKelfn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5i did this tweak, and my dog caught fire, my cat exploded and the nazi's are riding dino's outside.
- spectre_25gt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Would you like to point out where XP is listed on that first page at all? I sure as hell couldn't find it.
That's not to say that the information isn't relevant to XP. This type of tweak shouldn't really be all that different between point releases. - tupuli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"the kernel can obviously be paged just like anything else"
Not entirely true, since you can't page out the kernel code required to read pages back in :)
Some pages need to be "pinned" into memory and should not be subjected to the swap daemon. - uptown, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I started making this change and Clippy popped up:
"It looks like you're trying to hose your system .... would you like to: 1. prevent startup? 2. irrecoverably wipe your personal files? or 3. spend the next 4 hours trying to get things back to where they are right now?" - ermau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Except windows never fills up your physical ram unless you actually disable the paging file. I have yet to think of a reason why Windows would see ~600MB free in physical, but decide to use the paging file, yet it happens all the time
- kingfoot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3ok, looking at all the posts, it seems no xp sp2 users have posted it working, so im not doing it.
- bman212121, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I'm gonna try this out, for any doubters, this is straight from the horses mouth:
Tip one is a go.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/3d3b3c16-c901-46de-8485-166a819af3ad1033.mspx
Tip 2 is not reccommened by Microsoft.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/efa621bd-a031-4461-9e72-59197a7507b61033.mspx - Rabid_Llama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3For an idea of how much memory the kernel uses, hit ctrl-shift-esc (on winxp), go to the Performance tab, and look in the bottom right corner. That shows Kernel Memory in KB. Mine's around 150 megs right now, and 90% of it is paged for some stupid reason, despite having two gigs of memory, and 3/4 of it free. Go figure.
- coopa, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@ antareus
I'm just wondering what you mean about the trim on minimize for firefox, i've used that and can watch (just looking at taskman) the 'Mem Usage' drop when i minimize ff. I have heard in the past that you should keep an eye on the i/o bytes (or something similar). - potatomasher, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5OK you guys are lame. No i didn't read TFA...
But here's how virtual memory works... 32 bit addressable memory locations gives you access to 4GB of virtual memory. Windows splits that up into two 2GB regions: 2GB for user space programs (word, excel, games, etc) and 2GB for the kernel. Obviously most people don't have 4GB so most of it ends up being paged out to hard disk.
Forcing your kernel to always reside in memory will obviously force other stuff out, and increase page swapping for user programs. Could be good if you have a lot of memory, but horrible if not. Then again if you have enough memory your kernel would probably not even be swapped out..... - mecki78, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3First of all, this trick is very old. I have already used this one year ago. This registry entry is well documented on the Microsoft page, so it's anything but a hack!
Second, the Windows XP programmers knew very well whath they were doing. If they wanted this to stay in memory, the had set this option by default, but they didn't. It's not the task of the people to decide what is in memory and what not, it's the task of your OS, that's why you have one. No system in the world swaps any code to disk that has been used recently. So if a part of the kernel is swapped, it's only because it has not been used for a very long time. Now if you need it, it has to be swapped in, which might take a second, or let it be five (if your HD is awful slow), so what? What else could you have been doing in these 5 seconds anayway? But using this hack, you keep more stuff in memory in that way, code for other apps have to be swapped. IOW this hack makes your kernel faster, but something else has to get slower as the memory does not grow by this hack, so if code A is not swapped, code B has to be swapped (while otherwise code B could have staid in memory).
The only interesting hack is the second of the registry entries. This one will make sure Windows stops swapping application code just because it is minimized, what is the most annoying thing Windows does. When something is minimized and not used, Windows swaps it out, even though there is plenty of memory left and Windows would not need to swap it out. That's why sometimes apps de-minimize so slowely! But to set that, you need no registry hack, you can set this in the system performance tab in the system prefences panel, by setting the radio box to server mode, as on a server, a lot of apps run minimized (e.g. Apache) and swapping these is a very bad idea. - ElectroOverlord, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well I did a time mark of system boot, start up apps boot and normal application boot. The tweak improved most aspects. For what its worth I have a 3200 64, 1 Gig of 3200 Ram, and running 32 bit Windows.
I can easily see why microsoft would not load this as default but to suggest because it might now work for you it will not work for everyone is childish. System tweaks have always been hit or miss and those of us that like to tinker are gonna keep doing it. Crashes or no crashes...
No Crash this time for me...
on Backing up your reg -
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