Windows tweaks

[Richie P]

Windows XP Services

Here is a way to figure out which services to set as Automatic and which to set as manual or disabled.

Step1: Set ALL your services to *manual* setting.
Step2: Reboot computer and wait for windows XP to load. XP will boot pretty slowly, since it has to turn on each service
separately. Use your computer for a bit, doing what you normally do during a computing session. This will allow any
other services to activate (such as DHCP or other services that didn't load during the boot process).
Step3: Go back to the list of services, and see which ones are Started. Change the services that are marked as Started, to
*Automatic*. This way windows will automatically load all of the services that you normally use, and the ones that
you don't use will stay unloaded.

This is the worst advice EVER! I can't believe this post is stickied with such a potentially operting system crippling suggestion. Ok, so someone who knows about windows services does this, and then spends the next couple of reboot's turning all the services they need back on after not being able to do things they should be able to do and it just becomes a stpud idea....

But think about the person who does not know RPC from NTFS - setting all the services to manual would cripple the system with the user having no idea what to turn back on! They'd probably just end up setting everything to automatic just to have things working again!

I suggest this be sorted out - there's a perfectly good post in the parent forum with loads of links to tweak sites.

[p360stick]

thanks for the info

[Aegis]

KoolDrew is mostly right with his facts, but he did miss a few things. The tweak about shutting down faster is misleading, since all it does is kill any application/service that's not responding while you try to shut down. Also, the tweak to shutdown/restart the system doesn't work, since there is no user.exe or rundll.exe file on XP.

However, I would like to add that Drew's not always right. There are considerable benefits when you cut down on your services. The boot time goes down and so does your memory usage. If you want proof, check your current boot time and RAM usage, then change all of the services in services.msc to automatic and restart. I think there's going to be quite a difference.

Also the pagefile debate is an ongoing one, so I'm not going to attempt to sway you in one way or another. But contrary to what Drew mentioned, it is possible to run without a pagefile, as I'm doing right now with my main OS. I'd only recommend it if you have plenty of RAM. It all depends on how much trust you have in the Windows Memory Manager. I don't trust it to page out the right thing all of the time, so I disabled the PF to ensure that it can't page out my applications even if it wanted to.

[KoolDrew]

There are considerable benefits when you cut down on your services. The boot time goes down and so does your memory usage. If you want proof, check your current boot time and RAM usage, then change all of the services in services.msc to automatic and restart. I think there's going to be quite a difference.

Yes, disabling services may help your boot time. However, I barely ever reboot. Is it really worth it to disable a ton of services to save a few seconds in two weeks? It may be to some, but not for me.

As for helping memory usage, the real question is not whether or not disabling services decreases your memory usage. The real question is whether or not disabling services provices any real-world performance benefits. Disabling services does not do this. If a service is not being used the used memory by that service will be reclaimed by something that needs it.

I don't trust it to page out the right thing all of the time, so I disabled the PF to ensure that it can't page out my applications even if it wanted to.

You do realize the pagefile is not the only file involved with paging, correct? Even with the pagefile disabled, you are still paging. I already pointed this out earlier, but in case you missed it....

Also you should never disable the pagefile. Many people will also recommend this to improve performance, but all this will do is hurt you. First of all you have to realize the pagefile is NOT the only file involved with paging. All exe's and dl''s are also. So when you do disable the pagefile you have to keep all "private" data in RAM and only code and mapped files can be paged. So even if the "private" stuff has not been touched in hours. So this will cause more paging of code. It also means that paging cannot be correctly balanced. It will also cripple the file cache and slow down code execution. Also not to mention some applications will fail without a pagefile.

[euclid]

Yes, disabling services may help your boot time. However, I barely ever reboot. Is it really worth it to disable a ton of services to save a few seconds in two weeks? It may be to some, but not for me.

so for some users isnt faster boot time a real-world benefit? buy your parts already and start the overclocking process, and then tell me you dont care how fast your machine boots.

[Cappie]

You don't necessarily have to reboot your PC when you make registry changes, just open TASK MANAGER and kill the explorer.exe process, then go to FILE, NEW TASK(RUN), and start up explorer.exe again. Also cleaning out prefetch is a bad thing to do,

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000743.html

[Serra]

I'm surprised how long this thread has gone without a post. Too bad too, considering how important this thread should be to all performance enthusiasts and how woefully incomplete the information here is.

At any rate I gave this sticky a once through today when I came across this entry:

----------------

To speed up boot time

run "regedit" and navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Session Manager > MemoryManagment > PrefetchParameters

There you'll see a DWORD called "EnablePrefetcher" double click it and set the value between 5 to 7, which ever works better, I recommend 5.

Also after time it gets filled with unneeded stuff, navigate to C:\Windows\Prefetch and delete unnecesary files, if unsure, delete all files and restart twice, all needed files will be automatically created

-----------------

The issue here is that the PrefetchParameters registry key works like this:
1 means to prefetch boot processes only.
2 means prefetch applications only
3 means prefetch both (make sure you're using this) (default)

with no other numbers being defined. You can look this up anywhere. Setting this value to 5/7 won't do you anything setting it to 3 would (though I'm not sure if a value of greater than 3 defaults to 3 or 0).

It is also worth noting that despite what the above poster states, it does not hurt to clear out your prefetch folder. The reason is that although Windows Xp does trim this down depending upon number of entries (max=128), if you only need, say, 30 entries then 128 is about 4x that amount and does directly mean more prefetching than is necessary. I wouldn't clean this out weekly like some people suggest (it will take a few reboots for this to become fully populated with what you want again and those reboots will be slower), but I wouldn't say never clean it out.

[KoolDrew]

It is also worth noting that despite what the above poster states, it does not hurt to clear out your prefetch folder. The reason is that although Windows Xp does trim this down depending upon number of entries (max=128), if you only need, say, 30 entries then 128 is about 4x that amount and does directly mean more prefetching than is necessary. I wouldn't clean this out weekly like some people suggest (it will take a few reboots for this to become fully populated with what you want again and those reboots will be slower), but I wouldn't say never clean it out.

You obviously don't get how prefetch functions. You act as if the prefetch trace files are a cache and the prorams are preloading into memory upon startup. A .pf file is simply a list of pages to load that is only accessed upon starting that particular application. When you load an EXE, windows checks to see if there is a matching file in the prefetch folder and if there is, it loads those pages. If not, it tracks which pages are loaded and then creates a .pf file. Nothing is pre-loaded into memory at all. It is a feauture which atempts to lessen seek distances by prefetching every file in a particular directory, rather than jumping around the disk, which would normally happen without prefetch. A page from one file may be loaded, then a page from a different file, then back to getting a page from the original file upon request.

The ONLY thing cleaning out the prefetch folder gives you is a very tiny amount of disk space back. That's it. It definitely doesn't help performance, actually quite the contrary, at least initially until WIndows re-creates the trace files.

[bleagh]

I'm a bit confused...

Some time back I did a small test...
I did several bootups and timed them.
Then I disabled the Task Scheduler and cleared the prefetch folder.
I did several more bootup and timed them.

The boot times after I disabled the Task Scheduler were clearly faster than the ones before! So I just left the Task Scheduler disabled. But over time I noticed the boot times were getting slower. And defragging didn't help much at all.

So I re-enabled the Task Scheduler and left it on. It still didn't help my boot times. But I left it on for a few days (1+ bootups each day), then defragged. Then suddenly my bootup times increased again. So it would seem that the windows defragger uses the stuff in the prefetch folder when defragging.

So I'm not sure if it is worthwhile to disable the Task Scheduler or not. But if one does disable the Task Scheduler, it seems that they should enable it every couple of months, for at least a day or two, then defrag before disabling it again.

[chinaguy]

Vista SP1 is here downloading from MS web page.

Its just finished installing Vista SP1 so I am testing it out now.

BUT Vista SP1 now see all of the 4GB of RAM I have installed, as before it only said I had 3.5GB of RAM.

So SP1 has solved the one of my problems!

[EneergE]

Here is just a small tip I thought I might add to this thread. Windows XP is now a dying OS, but you can force rebuild the prefetch layout.ini file located in %windir%\prefetch which will tremendously increase boot-up time.

1) Delete ALL files in %windir%\prefetch
2) Start->Run : "rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks" (this is case sensitive)
3) Confirm that a new layout.ini file has been created in %windir%\prefetch

Disabling task scheduler prevents the prefetch from functioning properly, and also creates errors in the event log. You can use the previous tweak, instead, to receive a similar or equal performance boost with prefetch enabled. Prefetch helps launch files quicker, so I recommend it over disabling task scheduler.

You can do this every so often or setup a batch script to run the command on every reboot so that you can have a quicker bootup.

[slim142]

So did enabling SecondLevelCache helped anybody?
I just set mines to 512 to see if I get a little boost

[KoolDrew]

So did enabling SecondLevelCache helped anybody?
I just set mines to 512 to see if I get a little boost

...

If you do not set this value Windows will use HAL to determine the L2 cache size automatically. If this fails, a default value of 256KB is used, but this entry is means as a secondary source of cache size information for PC where the HAL is not capable of deteting the L2 cache. The HAL is capable of retrieving the L2 cache size of any CPU that is a Pentium II or newer.

[dan7777]

xp thought that died years ago lol dx 10-11 7 os dx 11

[slim142]

...

lol, thanks for that one, I didnt catch it.

[PaganII]

Black Viper started those tweaks when computers had little ram in them so some may be unnecessary but several are for SECURITY reasons, plugging holes and backdoors.

[HDCHOPPER]

Black Viper kicks a$$ and has been at it for years he has tweaks by OS too (all of them just look him up )

I will open a bag of worms here for christmas lol , XP partition alignment ( there is none by default ) you have to set it your self using diskpar not diskpart (diskpart will round off/up with XP)
Only 2 commands :

C:\diskpar-i x <<< X being the drive number as in disk management ( quary drive layout and partition information) XP default is 63 sectors you want 64 sectors to be aligned 64 sectors = 32K , 128 sectors = 64K 256 sectors = 128K and so on ect... FYI Vista & W7 default to 1024K..

C:\diskpar-s x <<< X being the drive number as in disk management (set partition information USE ON RAW DRIVE ONLY) << this is how you align the partition for XP set to 64 sectors or 128 or 256 ect you get it once you type this command in it will direct you what to do ....

This will improve drive performance esp if using an SSD dramatically once you have tried this you will neve understand why it wasn't this way long ago , Windows finaly saw the mistake by Vista and changed it ......

Have a safe new year...

[SabreWulf69]

Hi all, from SabreWulf over at NRNL Forums. This is my first post on the site that's helped me so much, so I thought in return I could help others here in kind by offering some of my personal tweaks over here (and in the process revive this thread's activity a little :-)) -

http://www.nrnl.org/general-windows-...eaks-t184.html

Lemme know what you think and feel free to add more. :-)