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Power Windows
Windows 98 allows many power tweaks. Here's what you need to know to run a lean, mean, killer machine
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1. Turn off Task Scheduler
First of all, turn off the Task Scheduler, unless it really is scheduling something important. Most users have no critical programs scheduled, especially after freshly installing Windows. The scheduling utility keeps running in the background, unnecessarily hogging memory. To disable it, double-click the Task Scheduler icon in the system tray and click Advanced > Stop Using Task Scheduler. When you create a scheduled task, the feature will be enabled.
2. Nix the Active Desktop
For a healthy Windows, you have to get rid of the Active Desktop. Microsoft had added this feature with Internet Explorer 4 and later into Windows when it integrated the browser and the operating system. It allows you to display Web content on the desktop itself. The Active Desktop hogs a ridiculous amount of memory and often causes the system to be unstable. Simply right-click on an empty area of the desktop and disable View as Web Page to turn this off. If you set JPEG or GIF files as your wallpaper, this feature needs to be turned on. It is better to convert them to BMPs before setting them as the wallpaper.
3. Enable DMA
Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a technique that hard disks and CD-ROM drives can use to transfer data directly to and from memory, without passing through the processor. DMA reduces the load on the system processor since data transfers do not require monitoring by the CPU. With DMA, a write or read operation can be executed in two to four clock cycles. Without DMA it will cost the CPU a minimum of 16 clock cycles per operation. Not only do disk read/write operations gain a significant boost in speed, but Windows also works faster, since it can load system files much faster and also accesses the swap file at higher speeds. Older hard disks and CD-ROM drives do not support DMA, but almost all computers today use DMA-compliant devices. In case you face a problem after enabling DMA, reboot Windows to Safe Mode and disable the option. Also, DMA needs to be enabled from the BIOS, but again, on most computers, this is on by default. DMA is supported only in Windows 95 OSR 2 and later. To enable DMA, open Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Expand the Disk drives tree, select the hard disk and click Properties. Under the Settings tab, check the DMA option. Repeat this for all other hard disks and the CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM drives.
4. File system properties
Changing the File System settings can also provide better performance. First, change your computer's role to a Network Server, even if it is not one. Open Control Panel > System > Performance and click File System. Under the Hard Disk tab, change the typical role of the computer to Network server instead of Desktop computer. The setting controls the size of various internal data structures used by the 32-bit file access driver
(VFAT). When you use the Desktop computer setting, VFAT allocates memory to record the 32 most recently accessed folders and 677 most recently accessed files, consuming approximately 10 KB of memory. With the Mobile or docking system setting, VFAT allocates memory to record 16 folders and 337 files, taking up around 5 KB of memory. As a Network server, VFAT allocates around 40 KB of memory to record 64 folders and 2,729 files. With the kind of memory available on systems today, this slight overhead hardly makes any difference, especially considering the performance gain it provides.
5. Optimise virtual memory
The way virtual memory is configured tremendously affects Windows performance. This is true for all versions of Windows, including the now-obsolete Windows 3.1. The swap file is what Windows uses to store temporary data when it runs out of RAM. Thus, your working is not limited by the amount of RAM on your machine. However, for a program to be able to use this data, it must be transferred back to the RAM. The data that is not immediately required is moved to a part of the hard disk and recalled when required. However, since hard disks are nowhere as fast as RAM, swapping data back and forth drastically reduces speed. No matter how much RAM you have, Windows will always use the swap file for some infrequently used parts of the OS (read the next tip to see how to avoid this).
By default, Windows uses a variable swap file that is created on bootup and where the size is dynamically modified when required. Though this works just fine, it is not the most optimal. You can never get the speed of RAM from the hard disk, but you can make it slightly faster. The best way to configure the swap file is to have a permanent swap file, preferably on a dedicated partition. This minimises the effect of disk fragmentation and increases seek time. Another practice that a few power users have adopted is to place the swap file on the first partition and the operating system on the following partition. Data closer to the centre of the drive is read slightly faster than data at the periphery. This is especially useful for PCs with only 64 or 128 MB of RAM where data would frequently be swapped to the hard disk and can be easily done with BIOSes that allow booting from the D drive.
To change the swap file settings, open Control Panel > System > Performance and click Virtual Memory. Choose 'Let me specify my own virtual memory settings' and select the drive for the swap file. Note that no matter what partition you boot from, it will always appear as the C drive from DOS and Windows 98, and the first partition that is recognised as C by the BIOS will be assigned a higher drive letter. Set the minimum and maximum size for the swap file. Both these numbers should be identical to set a permanent (non-variable) swap file. Ideally, it should be two-and-a-half times the amount of RAM on your system, but if you have a separate partition for it, you may not want it to be less than 512 MB-if it is lower, it will have to be a FAT16 partition, not FAT32.
6. Avoid the swap file
When Windows loads, it moves certain parts of the operating system to the swap file anyway, regardless of whether it has run out of RAM or not. This is very good for systems with less memory, since it leaves some free RAM and applications will start much faster. Otherwise, when you start an application and memory is required, Windows will have to first move all this data to the swap file to free up RAM. This functionality is usually not required on systems with 256 MB or more RAM, especially if they only run common productivity tools such as Office and Internet applications. You can prevent Windows from using the swap file until absolutely required by adding the line below to the [386Enh] section of the \Windows\ system.ini file. ConservativeSwapfile Usage=1 You can edit this file in Notepad. In case you face any problems such as programs crashing frequently, remove this line and reboot.
7. Display settings
The display settings affect the speed of Windows too. The more animations and transitions the OS has to show, the higher is the processor and RAM usage. Typically, turning off all such features instantaneously shows the difference in speed. Right-click an empty area of the desktop and click Properties. Under the Effects tab, uncheck the boxes for 'Animate windows, menus and lists', 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' and 'Show window contents while dragging'.
8. Disable Autorun
Autorun was an innovative feature to automatically launch programs from CD-ROM and DVD drives. However, the way it works, it affects system performance, apart from being irritating at times. While this feature is on, Windows polls the drive every 5 seconds to check if some media has been inserted. If it finds a new disc, it will check it for the autorun.inf file and execute the commands within this. This is quite an overhead, especially when you need the feature only sometimes. This is true for all versions of Windows. To turn it off, open Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Expand the CDROM tree, select the drive and click Properties. Under the Settings tab, disable 'Auto insert notification'.
9. Boot faster
Before Windows loads, it processes certain files to set the correct environment and load initial drivers and Windows settings. The config.sys typically loads drivers and the autoexec.bat sets the environment and runs programs before Windows loads. If these files are loading any unnecessary items, you should remove them. Both files can be edited in Notepad.
A third file, the msdos. sys, sets several parameters for Windows. It specifies the Windows folder, the location of the startup files, behaviour of the boot menu, etc. Changing a few parameters can ensure faster booting of the operating system. If any parameters exist, you can change its value, or simply add a line with the parameter. Before you can edit this file, however, you must strip its read-only and hidden attributes. To do this, open a Command Prompt window and type this command: attrib -h -r msdos.sys
When Windows is not shut down properly, it automatically runs Scandisk when it boots again. You can disable this by using
AutoScan=0. Setting its value to 1 will bring up a prompt asking if you want to run Scandisk and setting it to 2 will run Scandisk automatically.
BootDelay=x sets the amount of time you have to press [F8] to bring up the boot menu. The default value for this is 2 seconds. If BootMenu is set to 1, it will always bring up the boot menu, BootMenuDelay sets the number of seconds this menu is displayed for, before booting with the default selection. When BootWarn is set to 0, Windows will boot to Safe Mode without warning, whenever it does not start properly.
By now, you probably have FAT32 on all drives, so disk compression utilities will not work. You should disable the driver for this by setting DblSpace and DrvSpace to 0. Also, if you do not have a SCSI controller, set DoubleBuffer to 0. You can disable logging of the boot process by setting the value of DisableLog to 1. Setting SystemReg to 0 will disable scanning of the Registry at startup, but it is better to leave this on.
10. Using Tweak UI
Tweak UI is a very powerful software that lets you change various system settings without having to edit system files or fiddle with the Registry. It is free and can be downloaded from
www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/PowerToys/Networking/NTTweakUI.asp. Version 1.33 is a consolidated version that will work on Windows 9x as well as NT systems-it will give you different options on different
OSes. After it is installed, it will be available from the Control Panel. Using Tweak UI is pretty straightforward, but here are a few changes you must make to get better performance.
Under the General tab, disable Window animation, Smooth scrolling, Menu animation, Combo box animation and List box animation. On the Explorer tab, disable 'Animated Click here to begin'. Next, switch to the IE4 tab and disable 'Active Desktop enabled'. On the Boot tab, you can control boot settings such as the behaviour of the boot menu, Scandisk, etc. Autorun for CDs can be disabled under the Paranoia tab.