Windows XP - bottlenecks you could get rid of

Perhaps many users know how to make their computers fast. For those of you who don't, I'd like to list a few tweaks that I used in my HP zv5000z that were quite useful. Windows can perform better than it does by default. And the reason for that may sometimes even deal with delays programmed on purpose. Because Microsoft felt that having "slowed down" GUI reaction looks visually more pleasing than instantaneous response. Maybe they are right, but fortunately some of their settings are tweakable. I for one, like instant response and when I see how fast Python-programmed GUI can actually be (which feels very sloppy usually), I feel quite rewarded : )

1. Start/Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance Settings/
select Custom. Leave only Smooth edges of screen fonts, drop shadows for icon labels and use visual styles selected. Unselect the rest items and you will hardly see anything in term of Windows experience except for better performance.

2. Display properties / Appearance/Effects unselect "Use the following transitions effect for menus and tooltips".

3. Download free Windows XP toy:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
called "Tweak UI".
Using TweakUI, go to "Mouse", then "Menu speed", and move slider entirely to the left. Apply.
Now try, for example, how fast the Start menu items respond to the mouse pointer! Feels much like you just installed a 6 GHz CPU.

4. Get rid of unneeded software sitting in your RAM. Usually, notebooks are shipped with so many utilities that start up with Windows OS that the overall OS performance ultimately suffers. This is free utility that you can use to clean up the startup:
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
You can unselect ALL items that this program has found. Over years of using it, I've had 0 problems from doing so. (you may leave virus scanning SF or Firewalls, if you wish. I find no use for them sitting in the RAM all the time, given that I'm not opening "Make_money_fast.exe" files when I receive them over email form "sgh3372736f.erye.com" . Please make sure you know what you are doing and do it at your own discretion, I'm not taking any responsibility herein). Once StartupCPL was used, Windows Task Manager should have only 18-19 processes. Not 40 or 50 processes as some may be seeing and thinking all of them are there for their good. Windows needs only 18 processes to run in a fully functional and safe mode, and to run all the programs you have, and to burn CDs and to go wireless, and everything else.

Enjoy.

 

Thanks for the tips. I'll try at least some of them to see how I like 'em. I'm always on the lookout on how to shave off boot time, so thanks again. :hp:

 

Nice! Thanks for posting those. I love the improvement I'm seeing in menu speeds after using TweakUI.

Great post.

 

thanks for those tips

 

thanks alekkh, all good stuff and a very helpful post.

 

Any of you guys know of a site or a program that can tell me if it will screw up my system ending som of the startup programs. (i mean so that they don't run, upon startup).
I know that there is sites, which explain what the different programs and processes are, but not any who say if it will bugger up my system if they don't boot.
example:
TosBtMng.exe, which is a program for managing my toshiba bluetooth. Say I make this prgram not run.
Will my bluetooth operate, when i press my BT hotkey, will my system run the programs required, or will I have to find TosBtMng.exe (for example) manually, and run it.

I have alot of programs running on bootup (54), and would like to get rid of some, to free some ram, and shorten boot-time.

 

Attached is the list of process I have.
Mozilla and and screen capture programs are running, that is 19 processes load on boot up. With that config, all the hardware buttons and features of my laptop are fully operational.

To verify what's not needed in your system, you could use incremental process addition. Unselect all items in all fields in StartupCPL (do not delete them, just unselect). Restart your computer. That will do normal XP boot without all the junk present. If you find something is not functioning, simply go to StartupCPL, find the suspect process, right click and select "Run Now". That will start the process immediately and you will see if it fixed your prob. If it does, select it back to startup next time. That simple.

Now, some notebook manufacturers (E.g. IBM) like their "featured services" so much, you cannot see and remove them using StartupCPL. In my T42, there were 27 processes left even after I disabled everything in StartupCPL.


To remove those (if you feel IBM is taking too much control over you which I, of course, did; be careful as this tweak may not be as harmless as StartupCPL, if you unselect wrong stuff), do the following.
Go to Start button, select "Run", type msconfig
In the pannel that appears, go to "Startup", and "Services" and unselect items you think are there for wrong reason.

 

For more tweaks: http://www.winguides.com/tweak/tweaklist.php

 

thanks mtrivs

 

anything to help the community

 

do u know of any other XP tweaks like those??..i tried to do one...but it wasn't working

 

another good site for tweaks:
http://www.tweakxp.com/
and
http://www.mdgx.com/

You can also try different tweaking tools which have a GUI for a range of users (n00b to l337)...

try this site for some tweaking tools:
http://lists.gpick.com/pages/Tweaking_Tools.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,6906,00.asp


you might also find some interest in this article:
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,111111,pg,2,00.asp

 

what's a l337??...i never heard of that term b4

 

Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leetspeak

 

k..lol...thanks