 Performance
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PC Advice
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Optimizing Windows |
Optimizing is often described, very astutely, as a black art. What works on one system may not provide any measurable improvement on another; optimization involves a combination of appropriate hardware, well installed software, and tweaking of various parameters over time. Unless you have a grossly mis-tuned system, it's almost impossible to make massive improvements during an hour-long tuning session. This said, here are some guidelines for tuning your system.
First, identify the problem area. Is the video refresh too slow? Do you hear the disk grinding away every time you open a new application? Are you using high end animation or cutting edge games? Or is overall performance simply appalling, to the point where you open an application and go for coffee to give it time to start up?
Some of the above point more toward hardware limitations than software or OS tuning issues. Slow video refresh rates may point to outdated drivers, your graphics card might not have a fast enough processor or sufficient onboard memory to deal with the application at hand. Lots of disk activity during startup may point to a low-memory condition that can only be corrected by adding more RAM. Animation and high end games require all the above – excellent graphics capability, lots of memory, and also a fast CPU.
For the sake of argument, let's say your machine is fairly high end and has lots of available resources, but you're still seeing slow performance in certain areas. You can tweak certain settings using automated tools, but some don't work very well and others can actually degrade performance since their expectations may not match your workload. Some manual steps that improve performance for most people include:
- disable the Indexing service, which can take up lots of disk space and CPU time as it indexes your files. Disks are fast enough these days that this service provides little benefit.
- If your disks were formatted with FAT (old style DOS/Windows 95) partitions, upgrade them to NTFS.
- Move the Windows Pagefile to a separate physical disk (moving it to a different partition on the same drive has no effect, no matter what others might say).
- Disable System Tray items you don't really need. For instance, QuickTime and other applications install pre-load applications that can take up memory and CPU time, though the amounts are generally small.
- Disable Startup items you don't really need (simply remove them from the Programs -> Startup folder). This will save memory, and will also improve Windows boot performance since fewer applications need to be started.
- Cleaning the Windows Registry can impart a very slight improvement, but is vastly overrated as a performance improvement tool.
There are also many performance myths floating around the Internet. Many are documented on a web site about XP Myths, and include allegedly "hidden" or "secret" tweaks that users claim to have discovered.
Whatever you do, always use the scientific method when tuning a PC. Make a single change to the system, reboot if necessary, then test the effects of the change. Run a standard set of tests against each change – don't just surf around to different sites or run random applications, since this won't give you an accurate assessment of the results. Take notes, use a stopwatch, and always be ready to fall back to earlier settings if necessary.
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