Windows XP Alternative Tweaks

This is not your average Windows XP tweak tips that tells how to defrag your hard drive, check for DMA, disable startup programs, turn off Windows effects, blah blah. This is the next step.

This is not your average Windows XP tweak tips that tells how to defrag your hard drive, check for DMA (which is always on now, by the way), disable startup programs, turn off Windows effects, blah blah. Oh come on, we've all done that and there's nothing new and geeky about those tips. Now, we have to move to other tweaks that actually offer something new and do something useful for a change...

Turn off System Restore
I've never used System Restore to fix any problem in my Windows, ever. If I run into a problem, I try and isolate it, and fix it. If I can't fix it, I reinstall Windows. As simple as that. Along with the problematic settings and files, System Restore also tends to restore other files that may have been updated and could break any application recently installed. If you install/uninstall apps all the time like I do, it's best to keep this thing disabled. But that's not the only reason I prefer to stay away from System Restore. By default, it is set up to use 12% of your disk space, which amounts to over 4 GB on a 40 GB hard drive. Mine is a 160 gig, so... I don't even want to think about it.

To turn it off, go to My Computer properties, the System Restore tab and tick "Turn off System Restore". The stored files are deleted automatically and no reboot is necessary. And hey, you get some performance benefits too!

Turn off the Page File
The page file is a temporary hard disk file used as an extension to your physical memory. When some app demands more memory than available, the background apps are swapped to the disk and more physical memory is given to the foreground app. But most of us now have more than 512 MB of physical RAM on our systems. Even when there isn't any shortage of memory, the page file still exists and swapping of disk still takes place, so turning off the page file can offer you a significant performance gain. And if you don't have 512 MB, you really should upgrade, it isn't all that expensive right now. So seize the moment, grab the RAM by its horns!

To turn it off, go to My Computer properties, the Advanced tab, Performance settings, Advanced tab, Virtual Memory, then select "No paging file" and click Set. Repeat this for all your hard drives and or partitions (if you have more than one). This will need a reboot to become active.

Turn off Windows index_files/ing service
Not getting turned off by this guide are you? Heh. The Windows index_files/ing service index_files/es the files on your disks so you can find them faster and easier. Yeah right! We've all tried it and we all know it doesn't work. Well, at least not as intuitively anyway. It still takes eons to search using the standard XP search tool. The service constantly stays on in the background and takes some CPU to do its useless index_files/ing. Off with its head! Use AvaFind instead (review coming soon!).

To turn it off, go to the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Windows Components and untick 'index_files/ing Service'.

Turn off the disk performance counters
Windows XP has performance monitors that are constantly, well, monitoring your system. These are mostly a statistical tool, used by system administrators and maybe some overclocking and water-cooling geeks. If you don't fit into either category, you don't need these performance counters, for example a particular disk performance monitor. Since it's perpetually doing its job of monitoring the performance of your hard disks, it can take up a bit of CPU as well as HDD time and turning it off can only mean a good thing.

To turn it off, head over to the command prompt and type 'diskperf -N'. You don't need to reboot your system after this.

Flush out the PreFetch cache
To speed up launching of frequently used programs, Windows caches a part of the executable files into a reserved area of the disk. After a while, this folder can get pretty full of cached prefetches for programs that you may have stopped using or even uninstalled. Windows doesn't automatically remove these files, so it's a good idea to flush out the cache from time to time, depending on how often you switch applications.

The cache is in the C:\Windows\Prefetch folder. Simply empty the folder and we're done. Windows will build new prefetches as you start using your apps. As a safety measure, however, you can remove files not created or updated in the last two or three weeks. This will maintain prefetch data for apps that you recently used and are more likely to reuse soon.

Now there aren't any changes to be made to the Windows Registry for any of these tweaks, so you don't need to worry about backing up anything. There are lots more tips coming up, so watch out for more! Enjoy a faster system!