Hi chw295,
For many customizations, what you want to adjust will depend on what you are going to be using the system for. As far as a few general things:
1) To speed up boot time you can do some things such as: disable unused services and ports; limit items in startup folder (and in registry startup) to only essentially needed items; disable/remove hibernation if you will not be using it; you can use the free Microsoft utility
BootVis.exe to arrange startup processes to load in the fastest way (there is a short article about that
here); you can set a boot defragment (see same article). As far as speeding up the computer once it's running: defrag the hard drive regularly; set a static virtual memory swap file (generally accepted is 1.5 times amount of physical ram); turn off indexing on hard drives (searches may be somewhat slower, but overall disk performance will be faster); turn off all the screen effects and other eye candy; probably a handful of other things as well.
2) For partitioning your hard drive, this is purely a matter of tailoring it to your specific use. Questions you may want to ask yourself are: what will I use each partition for, and how much space will each require? Will I want to have more than one OS installed? Will I want to have a DOS (or other) partition for recovery/experimentation purposes? Within XP, will I want to have separate partitions for XP and the rest of the apps and user files?
When you figure out exactly what you will be using your laptop for on a daily basis, and how much space each use type will require, you can make an educated decision about if you need more than one partition, and what size each one needs to be.
Cheers,
Stevo
zv5000z: Ath64_3400+ (2.2GHz) - 1GB DDR - 80GB 5400rpm - 64MB GeForce4 440 - 15.0" XGA, DVDRW, harman/kardon speakers
Last edited by a moderator:
Feb 2, 2015
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