Tweaking
Windows XP
By: Frank Betsa, YSU Help Desk
Is XP the fastest version of Windows ever? That's
debatable, but this is not: like every operating system that came before it, it's
not as fast as it could be without a whole bunch of fine-tuning. Windows
operating systems are never streamlined by default. Part of the reason is that
their install base is huge--many times that of any other operating system (in
fact, probably every other operating system combined). No matter how well
polished and optimized any Windows OS may be, Microsoft must balance
performance with ease of use and across-the-board compatibility. Therefore,
Windows XP makes quite a few assumptions about how it's going to be used. Its
aesthetics are designed to give the GUI a warm, friendly appearance, but
effects like drop shadows and fading menus slow the OS down ever so slightly.
Failsafe tools like System Restore can make recovering from crashes and
incompatibilities easier, but they eat up disk space and their quiet work in
the background requires processor clock cycles. Windows XP also activates a
whole batch of services that you may or may not need, depending on how you use
your computer. Streamlining your system's pool of processes can expedite the
OS's startup and save some clock cycles for foreground applications. Likewise,
common commercial software like Quicken, Microsoft Office, and others load
their own background applications that eat up system memory and monopolize the
processor. If you spend a few minutes eliminating applets and services you
don't need, and are willing to sacrifice some of XP's visual goodies, you can
noticeably improve game and application performance on an XP box. XP itself
even helps by optimizing its file system based on your computing habits, and
Microsoft provides a few hands-on applets to speed up the optimization process.
Windows XP is highly customizable. Microsoft took
care to make a great deal of its tweaks easily accessible to users of any
experience level. Experimenting with them and getting your hands dirty is the
best way to find your personal sweet spot in the mix of eye candy and system
performance. Of everything you can do to optimize Windows XP, one of the
simplest is just to use it. As you launch and exploit applications, Windows
observes your behavior and updates a dynamic file called Layout.ini. After
every three days, when it senses that the computer is idle, it rearranges the
locations of programs on the system hard drive to optimize their launch and
execution. XP also speeds up and the boot process and optimizes the launch of
programs by using prefetching. Windows observes the code and programs that are
used immediately upon boot up and creates a list of data to prefetch very early
in the boot process. Similarly, as individual programs are launched, Windows
keeps track of different files and components are accessed. The next time the
application is accessed, Windows prefetches the necessary items to expedite the
application's launch. Disk optimization and application/boot prefetching work
in tandem. That is, when XP optimizes file system for faster program access,
the data it recorded for the application and boot up prefetch processes is
factored in to determine optimal file placement on the disks.
Another relatively easy way to help your processor
along is to tweak the vast amounts of “eye candy”. A tidy desktop is an
efficient desktop. Your system's memory and CPU have better things to do than
toy with pretty backgrounds and sort out eighty-five desktop icons. As is the
case with previous versions of Windows, excessive desktop icons and desktop
wallpaper take up their share of system memory, and they're constantly
refreshed by the graphics subsystems. Animated desktops are particularly hard
on a system's core resources. On the other hand, the performance hit leveraged
by such minor glitter is minimal, so as long as your system has more than 128MB
of RAM and a semi-modern processor (something in the range of 600MHz or faster)
then don't worry too much about icons and wallpaper. However, if you're limping
along with 64MB of RAM on a 200MHz Pentium Pro (I don’t recommend trying to run
XP on such a machine), then every clock cycle is critical. Lose the fluff. With
its smarmy new look and its GNOME-like skinning ability, Windows XP has even
more eye candy than any previous version of Microsoft's operating systems. Menu
transitions are animated, dialogs and mouse cursors have shadows, screen fonts
are tweaked for maximum readability, and so on. All of the visual splendor can
degrade the responsiveness of the user interface. XP runs a few tests to
auto-configure its GUI settings for a mix of beauty and usability, but its
decisions are easily overridden. If fading menus are more annoying than eye
catching, and dialog box shadows don't mean squat to you, experiment with the
settings to your heart's content. Some of the settings are accessed through the
Appearance tab on the Display Properties, which you can evoke by right-clicking
on an empty area of the desktop and selecting Properties. Click on the Effects
button and you can tweak the menu transitions, shadows and font
properties--including Microsoft's swarthy new ClearType smoothing technique,
which is available in the second pull-down box. To me, it makes screen fonts
look wonderful on laptop and flat-panel monitors, but I find it to be a tiny
bit blurry on traditional CRT screens. Note that some people find ClearType to
be less appealing on their laptops and flat panels than the standard fonts. Try
it for yourself.
You can further tweak GUI performance through the
System Properties tool. Open it through Control Panel or by right-clicking on
My Computer and selecting Properties. Choose the Advanced tab. Radio buttons
let you optimize for visuals and performance, or you can customize your mix
from a list of check-boxed visual effects options. Click on the Advanced tab of
the Performance Options dialog and ensure that processor scheduling and memory
usage are configured for programs--you'll only want to configure them for
background services and caching if the PC in question is a server. This is also
where you can specify the size and location of your system's paging file.
Windows XP does an excellent, efficient job of managing its own paging file,
and extensive testing has shown no advantage in synthetic or gaming benchmarks
to manually overriding XP's paging file handling.
As with any
system changes, before you begin, make sure you back up any critical data files
just incase a finger fumble results in a complete OS meltdown. If you’re really
hesitant in making some minor changes to your system to increase performance,
you can always contact an IT professional to help you along the way.
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