Windows XP Optimization Guide

[Jimmy 2004]

This might be a dumb question, but when setting the SecondLevelDataCache for my X2 3800 939 CPU, should i make it 512 or 1GB?

I'm guessing you mean MB, not GB... and that tweak doesn't do anything by the way, it shouldn't do any harm but don't worry too much - if you aren't sure just don't change it

 

[demonbrawn]

oh, yeah i meant 1MB. Hah, how ridiculous would that be...

 

[inachu]

Many good tips but he also forgot to mention.....

Disable Themes under sytem services. (gain back 10% system speed in most cases)

Use system mechanic to clean the system registry(much much better!)

built in defrag or disk keeper defrag is not as good as VOPT(vopt.com)

I have sent diskeeper(executive.com) many email regarding their defrag program and whiel the program itself does a great job defragging it fails in truly compressing the data when there might come a need to partition your hard drive then disk keeper fails as data is still most of the time all over the place. vopt is a partitioning jobs friend in the end. as it highly compresses data tightly together.

but before you run vopt run system mechanic first.

If you have more than one hard drive then put the system environment variables of TMP and TEMP on that second hard drive. Or if you really want to be cool afte ryou did all that raid setup and use 3 hard drives for raid and have 2 others as slaves then do this......

1 raid
2 raid
3 raid
4 swap
5 temp\tmp (system environment variables set to the E: or F:drive.)

You might not stop drooling if you setup your system hard drives like that.
Or if you have 6 hard drives then make the 6th just for c:\program files and nothing else!

 

[Wile E]

Disabling Themes makes no difference whatsoever on my system, it just looks ugly, and goes the same speed.

And you don't have to use System Mechanic to clean your registry, there are a number of great registry cleaners, some of them free. Like APK Registry Cleaning Engine 2002++ SR7.

O&O Defrag is another great defrag program as well. I'll have to try VOPT, however. Sounds interesting.

 

[inachu]

The only reason why I say use system mechanic is that I have tried the others and while otehrs might rally fix more prolems I found system mechanic fixing things within the bounds of safety. A few of them would clean so much than my system no longer booted.

My personal favorite version of system mechanic is V. 5 , Version 6 is bloatware and they improved this in version 7.

The simple school of training in Microsoft is that if there is a registry in the sytem that does not point to anything then THAT is an error in itself.

Of course we all know that many programmers place dead dummy registry entries as counters or place holders so that if it was uninstalled and reinstalled to bypass 30 day trial ware that it would still not work. But people are smart by using tea timer from SPYBOT search and destroy to really cripple what software tries to do on our own system.

In essense you can just delete that registry entry and keep getting a full 30 days use every day forever.

So I cry foul on any crafty reg hacker be they corporate programmers for the retail outlets or spyware idiots who want to hide entire programs within our system registries.

Either way no matter who it is it is WE the end consumer who own our computers should be able to control our system no matter how far and it is those people preventing us our own right to properly clean our system thus just making us reinstall windows.

I could go on and on on my wild tangents on the registry but I really miss the good ole days of the INI file....... so simple.

 

[ex_reven]

Hey, you know CLI.exe?
its a service for ATI...but why do i have three of them?

they use about 28mb each...

Same with ati2evxx.exe, theres two of them

 

[Namslas90]

Hey, you know CLI.exe?
its a service for ATI...but why do i have three of them?

they use about 28mb each...

Same with ati2evxx.exe, theres two of them

APK registry cleaner should have got em if you don't need em. I had up to faive at one time, ran APK cleaner, down to one. How many diff ATI cards u got?

 

[ex_reven]

just the one...x1950 pro...

i tried to run apk's tool before...wouldnt work before, but il try again
Im a clean freak, so its probably worth the effort lol.

Btw you running in invisible mode namslas ?

 

[Namslas90]

just the one...x1950 pro...

i tried to run apk's tool before...wouldnt work before, but il try again
Im a clean freak, so its probably worth the effort lol.

Btw you running in invisible mode namslas ?

This time try the one in the TOP utilities folder not the bottom folder.

 

[ex_reven]

lol i know, thats the one i ran last time haha, i couldnt get the program to initialise...im not stupid enough to think that a registry key is a program

 

[Namslas90]

lol i know, thats the one i ran last time haha, i couldnt get the program to initialise...im not stupid enough to think that a registry key is a program

Didn't mean to imply anything, just noticed once when I was in a hurry i downloaded the wrong one.

 

[ex_reven]

Thats ok lol

I redownloaded it and i got it working !
I must have missed one of the dlls or reg files last time when i had to copy them.
I remember copying them to those folders (they were still there in fact, because windows prompted me to overwrite the files)...so im guessing i must have missed one little file...oh well

What exactly can i do with APK tools that i cant with the typical WIndows stuff like services.msc, msconfig etc?

 

[Wile E]

What exactly can i do with APK tools that i cant with the typical WIndows stuff like services.msc, msconfig etc?

Find unused/useless reg keys. Well, you can do that with regedit, but that's a whole lot of manual searching. lol

 

[Namslas90]

Thats ok lol

I redownloaded it and i got it working !
I must have missed one of the dlls or reg files last time when i had to copy them.
I remember copying them to those folders (they were still there in fact, because windows prompted me to overwrite the files)...so im guessing i must have missed one little file...oh well

What exactly can i do with APK tools that i cant with the typical WIndows stuff like services.msc, msconfig etc?

Run it, click analyze, it'll run for about 20-30 minutes and test every registry link to ensure it is working and needed. If not it'll show up on the screen. When it's done r-clk delete. (you can also back up registry first) Windows won't delete registry entries like AOL etc, they want u to use them.

 

[Namslas90]

did you dwnload APK TOOLS or APK Registry Cleaner Engine 2000 +

 

[ex_reven]

Find unused/useless reg keys. Well, you can do that with regedit, but that's a whole lot of manual searching. lol

Ah i use Abexo Free Registry Cleaner for that, oh well

Message to Namslas

Cool, i started scanning about 10 mins ago, so it just finished ...
Thanks for the heads up, il play around a bit with it

 

[deyamag]

Really, thank U very much 4 Ol.

 

[AsRock]

Good Job Death Star,

 

[hat]

Got a quick question here. When tweaking the amount of L2 cache...
What if I have a dual-core CPU and I have 2MB total of cache (2x1024)? Do I tell it 1024, 2048, or what?

 

[hat]

anyone?

 

[Athlon2K15]

you need to put 400 in the box in registry editor

 

[Laurijan]

You should add something about page file optimization as well

 

[hat]

The only thing that can be done to optomize the page file is make sure it's not on the system drive, as far as I know.

 

[Laurijan]

What about its optimal size and what about making min and max value the same to prevent its fragmentation.

 

[trog100]

i always make mine a minimum size just to save disk space.. but assuming u have enough real ram windows wont use its fake hardrive memory.. why the hell should it..

once u turn out of the real stuff windows will use its pagefile.sys.. when it does your machine will grind to a halt..

years ago windows really had to use its pretend ram.. but years ago windows had to run on 32 megs of the real stuff.. most of what u read is way out of date.. just ignore it..

trog