There are hundreds of potential windows XP tweaks available, but if you want to get a significant performance boost from XP, then the ones listed here are the top few to try, as they tend to deliver the best performance benefits.

Graphical User Interface and Themes

The Standard Windows XP desktop "Theme" is a real sap on your PC resources. All those big chunky (and some would say, ugly) buttons, fade-ins, fade-outs, transparents effects and so on absolutely guzzle your PC resources, even if you have a high quality graphics card.

You can improve the performance of your desktop by changing your theme to use fewer fancier effects. This achieved with the following two steps.

Disable XP Themes

1.  Right click the desktop and select Properties.

2.  In the dropdown listbox under Theme:, select Windows Classic and Apply.

Disable XP Visual Effects

1.  Open the System Control Panel applet.

2.  On the Avanced tab, select Settings in the Performance frame.

3.  On the Visual Effects tab, select Adjust for best performance and Apply.

4.  Turn on (select) Smooth edges of screen fonts.

 Use NTFS

NTFS is the file system inherited from Windows NT, the predecessor of windows XP. While XP supports all the existing windows Filesystem formats (i.e. the way in which your hard disk is organised), NTFS is recommended as the best file system for Windows XP. It provides various benefits in the areas  of functionality, security, stability, availability, reliability, performance and recoverability (in the event of failure)..

It's unlikely you will need to run a FAT32 (windows 98 style) file system, unless you are still using disks created on a Windows 98 installation - it's therefore recommended to make sure you are running NTFS. If you needs to convert a FAT32 system to NTFS see  NTFS, FAT32 and the Conversion Process article on this site for more information.

Disable "Last Access" Timestamp

By default whenever XP reads a file, it also stamps the file with the current date and time - the "access" time. This functionality is not required for normal use unless you rely on the date of last access for searching for files or perhaps for backup reasons. When XP Timestamps a file that has just been read, it also  means that a write operation also has to be executed to disk in order to update the timestamp. That means every "read" also turns into a "write", which slows down the process of reading files!

To resolve this, Run a command prompt (START -> All Programs -> Accessories). At the command prompt, enter the following then reboot;

FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1

(please note that the above spelling is correct - it's american).

If you need to turn timestamping on again, use the same  the command and replace the 1 with 0.

Memory Management and Processor Scheduling

XP's heritage is windows NT which was designed as a "production environment" version of windows. I.e. used in server and corporate environments for mission-critical applications. As a result it has a number of options for tweaking the way memory is used in order to extract more performance, depending on the types of tasks the system is being used for.

For example, some systems (such as web servers) run background server processes and may never actually run any desktop applications (i.e. no one will sit in front of the machine and log onto it to read emails, write documents or surf the web). For optimum performance in these environments XP can be configured to use its memory and processor in a different way.

Generally 256MB of RAM of RAM will be the minimum to take advantage of these tweaks. Many servers will be configured with 1Gb or 2Gb of memory or more - in fact many years ago I was using servers with that level of memory; and these steps help to make use of it. With plenty memory and faster processors, these changes can deliver significant performance boosts.

Some of these tweaks require registry edits, while some of them are also available via the XP performance configuration panel.

How to get to the XP performance configuration panel:
Right click on My Computer. Choose Properties. Click the Advanced tab, then Settings under Performance. Then the Advanced tab.

Either method (where both are available) will have the same effect. In fact, it's recommended not to perform any registry edits unless you know what you are doing. At the very least, do a  registry backup before you start..

Memory Management: Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning

The "DisablePagingExecutive" entry in the registry prevents the kernel (the core of the XP Operating System) from being written out to the page file. The page file is a permanent file on disk used as a temporary memory store - which effectively increases the working size of your PC memory by several times. The effect of this element of the tweak is to cause Windows to cache the Kernel permanently in RAM instead of on disk, which makes XP significantly more responsive.

Alongside this, The "LargeSystemCache" registry entry forces XP to allocate all but 4MB of system memory (i.e. memory pre-allocated for use by the system, rather than program data) to caching the system files. The remaining 4MB of system memory is used for disk caching, though XP will allocate more memory if it is needed.

This works to speed up your computer because it is faster to read data from memory than it is from disk, perhaps by as much as 50 times. By default XP doesn't keep all the system files it needs to run in memory, but reads them from disk as required, and caches the files that are being used the most. However, with this setting you are forcing XP to keep those system files in memory - and so access to them is very fast indeed. What's more, in situations where you have lots of spare RAM, it's forcing windows to use up some of that RAM that it otherwise might be keeping "for a rainy day" - i.e. might otherwise not get used.

Bear in mind that some disk-intensive applications may see a drop in performance from changing the LargeSystemCache, because implementing a large System Cache may reduce the available disk data cache. If you find this is the case on your system, simply set the the "Memory Usage" setting back to "Programs". This also applies to systems running SQL Server (or other databases such as Oracle), Internet Information Server (IIS) and some video editing systems, because these handle caching for themselves.

Start regedit and navigate to the following key: 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]

Add these two lines, save the changes and reboot;

"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

Note that you don't have to edit the registry to change the "LargeSystemCache" setting. In fact on XP you can  change this by going to My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> [Performance] Settings -> Advanced -> Memory Usage and set the value to "System" rather than "Programs".

Once of the effects you should see from this performance enhancement is that memory hungry applications are very quick to reload on your system if you have already used them once. (E.g. Adobe Photoshop, Microsfot Office).

Memory Management: Separate Explorer Window Processes

This setting provides faster performance and also has an added side-benefit of greater stability. This tweak causes multiple instances of the same application to execute in their own process and memory space, and doesn't just apply to the Windows Explorer process.

In doings so, of course, more memory is required - because applications no longer share the common libraries (DLLs) they require: they each load their own copy into memory. However, if you have RAM to spare (e.g. 512MB or more)  this tweak is well worth implementing because it means that if one instance of an application crashes (e.g.  Internet Explorer ) any other running instances are unaffected and will continue to run. (How many times have you had one window crash, and it has taken out four or five others??!!)

1.  Start Windows Explorer.

2.  Select Tools.

3.  Select Folder Options then select the View tab.

4.  Check the "Launch folder windows in separate process" box and click Apply.

Processor Scheduling

On Windows XP you can control the way the system allocates processor timeslices to different types of system process. Remember that earlier on we discussed certain PC systems being used to run things like web servers. In this type of environment, the processes are actually run as "background services" - these are services that XP can control (e.g. stop/start) automatically and track for events and report alarms (e.g. crashes). This is necessary in a production environment to keep systems running smoothly 24x7.

However, on your system at home you are unlikely to need this type of configuration As a result of this tweak, short variable-length processor timeslices will be allocated to foreground processes (applications) three times more often than those timeslices given to background processes.

Start regedit and navigate to the following key: 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl]

Change the dword value of Win32PrioritySeparation, save the changes and reboot;

"Win32PrioritySeparation"=dword:00000026

NOTE: The Win32PrioritySeparation value of 26 is hexadecimal. this corresponds to 38 decimal. (The intial value may well be 00000002).

Once again, you can also control this behaviour through the performance configuration panel, and adjusting the "Processor Scheduling" setting to either Programs or Background Services as you require.

Obviously if you are running background processes, such as databases or webservers, it will probably not be appropriate to apply this tweak.

You can get more information on this tweak and how it works here on google.

Contolling your Pagefiles

A full discussion of pagefiles is beyond the scope of this article - however, as already mentioned, it the mechanism by which windows creates extra "memory" for itself by using your harddisk. When a system is running short on memory it will save portions of the memory and process tables to disk. It makes sense for this operation to be as fast and efficient as possible. Putting your pagefile on a separate disk is very helpful in this respect.

If you have two or more disks available on your system then by creating a pagefile on a less active disk that does not contain your windows operating system will improve performance of paging. You can even have more than one pagefile and windows will make use of the "least busy" disk.

Go to My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> [Performance] Settings -> Advanced -> [Virtual Memory] Change  and on one of your spare disks create and SET a "System Managed" pagefile.

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