In the original “Ten Ways To Make Windows XP Run Better” Langa covered many fundamental tweaks and adjustments that can help you to move XP out of its bland and sometimes limiting default settings and into a configuration that better fits your own personal needs, preferences, and work style. Fred Langa now examines free add-ons and utilities that further refine and improve your operating system.
Ten More Ways To Make Windows XP Run Even Better
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Think the article missed a couple, so here ya go ….
http://www.monroeworld.com/pchelp/xptweaks.php
The QOS tip is a myth the way it’s suggested is NOT how it actually works, more research needed there.
This reminds me of the good old days when I used to spend an unforgivable amount of my time getting the best out Windows. Tweaking, tinkering, tampering and ultimately reinstalling the damned operating system only to begin repeating the cycle again. It was fun. I had a feeling of control.
In anyway, for the hardcore Windows geek and tweaker, you might be interesting in the best tweaking tool I found for windows. It’s called X-Setup Pro. It’s a freeware. Install it an tweak to your hearts delight. Just make sure you know what you are doing. 🙂
http://www.x-setup.net/downloads/home.asp?lang=EN
Okay, well it used to be free, but now they say it’s free for beta and older version. Anyway give it a try.
The most significant thing I ever did to improve my laptop’s performance was to remove Norton AV. Been using Norton AV for many years now and my Windows 200 Desktop at home is okay with it but it made my Dell 300m perform like a fully tasked P133 running the first incarnation of Windows 98. Now it just flies without it.
What is Windows XP? Why do i need it anyway? Im doing everything i need to do without problems under Windows 2000:)
Good tips, but I prefer MyIE2 over all the other IE ‘shells’ … I use it because the intranet where I work requires it, unfortunately.
XP has some advantages and some disadvantages compared to Win2k. Win2k is more solid from my experience, even compared to XP SP1, but some might have other stories to tell, as always.
Some people are doing everything they need to do without problems under Win95( believe it or not) so what’s win2k to them?
I find that XP is a little more friendly towards games, and handles better plugging/unplugging USB devices.
Other than that, they seem largely the same
I used to use W2K religiously until one day after a set of W2K security, my USB scanner stopped working. Tried re-installing the drivers, etc…nothing.
Hooked it up to the other PC that had XP on it and it worked….made a disk image, formatted the drive and installed XP…everything works fine now, although XP is slower than W2K, even after all that GUI crap is deactivated.
Um I don’t know what web he browses but the common one has photo images on it, and having used a computer with 16 bit images for a while (a lot of images contain colors beyond 16 bit precision). Of course you will live and it will be usable, but if your computer runs XP then I think you can afford the extra byte per pixel on the screen. I run my Gnome desktop at 1280×1024 w/24bit colors on a GeForce 4MX, $70 card one year ago and I don’t have any slow down.
I should probably spend some time dinkin with the swap file, I wish I could just turn it off. I dislike how it uses it when it doesn’t need to.
I think the best thing you can do is turn off XP’s style, and use good 3rd party apps. Windows, even NT, doesn’t do well with badly written applications.
did we forget http://www.tweakxp.com
And comon, this dude us talking about speeding up XP and turns the build in firewall on :S was he writing about the spediest way to get hacked.
From article:
“You can turn off both behaviors by right clicking on My Computer, selecting Properties, and first choosing the Automatic Updates tab. Select either Turn Off or, minimally, Notify me.”
He shouldn’t even bring up turning auto updates off. Some people may think oh, golly jee, turning it off will make my intorweb and email faster.
Easy… If you can (you can afford it and your computer can still take it), BUY MORE RAM
“What is Windows XP? Why do i need it anyway? Im doing everything i need to do without problems under Windows 2000:) ”
XP *IS* 2000, only with better DirectX support for games (and few very little details).
If you play games, bother.
If you don’t play games, don’t bother.
Unfortunately the virtual memory assessment and recommendation made in the article is ambiguous.
Generally a good rule of thumb is to have a pagefile twice the size of the physical RAM to accomodate the dumps. Now this is slightly changed when large amounts of RAM are used (+1024M). Typically, instead of wasting 2-8 Gigs of hard drive space for a page file, I will leave the page file at a set 1&1/2 of the Physical RAM, and then tweak the registry to disable paging of the NT kernel (this can be done anytime, however it works better with large amounts of physical memory).
“Splitting” the pagefile is OK, as long as there is a sizable amount on ‘C:’ as windows uses this to dump data from the physical memory in the case of a BSOD.
DO NOT, set the pagefile on ‘C:’ to the same size of your physical RAM, and DO NOT yank the page file off of the c drive and place it on the D drive or wherever else.
Instead….use the ‘C:’ as your “system partition” which is what it is anyway, and move any frequently changing data/files/blah to a separate partition.
Everyone has their own belief on these settings, however I have used these settings since NT, and they have remained true through XP (and even suggested now).
In my opinion this article was not meant for it’s intended audience (power-users) and was more for a newbie that is still playing with basic settings and getting a feel for them. If you want a good article for tweaking XP look into the February issue of Maximum PC magazine (a tweakers magazine).