About a year ago I picked up a copy of CPU magazine in an airport and it had the article below in it. All of the machines I have applied the below hacks to have become a fair bit snappier. I have since become a subscriber and find it to be the best magazine for me because it is usually at or above my level of understanding.
Since this is blatant rip off of their stuff... consider subscribing.... or at least buy an issue if you see in on a shelf.
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Use all your memory. WinXP swaps data into virtual memory (aka your hard drive) even when it doesn’t have to, which is why you will get mysterious disk activity in the background even if you have only one app open and a full gig of system RAM. You can force the OS to swap data to disk only when it runs out of volatile memory by adding a line to your System.ini file. Go to the Run dialog box and type msconfig to open the System Configuration Utility dialog box. In the System.ini tab, highlight [386enh] and click New to add a new line beneath this branch. Type ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in the empty box that appears, then click Apply and restart your PC. We found that this helped clean up game jerkiness because it reduces the background file swapping that causes video hiccups and pauses.
Down with dead DLLs. After you shut down a program, Windows tends to hold some of that app’s DLLs in memory, which hogs resources and can slow down your PC’s loading of the next app. End this behavior with a Registry tweak. (Before starting, you may want to check out all applicable instructions and warnings about proper Registry editing in the previous two Software Tips articles: December CPU page 94, January CPU page 95). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\EXPLORER and create a new subkey named AlwaysUnloadDLL. This will create a default DWORD value, which you should give a value of 1.
Mo’ memory, mo’ memory, mo’ memory. Two DWORD values, all at the same Registry key, may goose system performance by keeping more of XP’s code in memory at once. Use these values only if you are well stocked with RAM, preferably 512MB (although these tweaks may help systems with 256MB, as well). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM \CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\SESSIONMANAGER\MEMORYMANAGEMENT. The DisablePagingExecutive value controls whether XP pages data from memory to the hard drive, and changing the default value of 0 to 1 turns paging off and may make general operations faster.
Changing the LargeSystemCache value from its default of 0 to 1 tells XP to keep as much of its kernel in memory as possible. Monitor its effect on 256MB systems because it can actually worsen performance by forcing very large applications to swap to disk more often. These two tweaks produced noticeably smoother performance on our testbed with only 256MB.
Since this is blatant rip off of their stuff... consider subscribing.... or at least buy an issue if you see in on a shelf.
--------------------------BEGIN CPU MAGAZINE [MAR 2003]------------------------------
Use all your memory. WinXP swaps data into virtual memory (aka your hard drive) even when it doesn’t have to, which is why you will get mysterious disk activity in the background even if you have only one app open and a full gig of system RAM. You can force the OS to swap data to disk only when it runs out of volatile memory by adding a line to your System.ini file. Go to the Run dialog box and type msconfig to open the System Configuration Utility dialog box. In the System.ini tab, highlight [386enh] and click New to add a new line beneath this branch. Type ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in the empty box that appears, then click Apply and restart your PC. We found that this helped clean up game jerkiness because it reduces the background file swapping that causes video hiccups and pauses.
Down with dead DLLs. After you shut down a program, Windows tends to hold some of that app’s DLLs in memory, which hogs resources and can slow down your PC’s loading of the next app. End this behavior with a Registry tweak. (Before starting, you may want to check out all applicable instructions and warnings about proper Registry editing in the previous two Software Tips articles: December CPU page 94, January CPU page 95). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\EXPLORER and create a new subkey named AlwaysUnloadDLL. This will create a default DWORD value, which you should give a value of 1.
Mo’ memory, mo’ memory, mo’ memory. Two DWORD values, all at the same Registry key, may goose system performance by keeping more of XP’s code in memory at once. Use these values only if you are well stocked with RAM, preferably 512MB (although these tweaks may help systems with 256MB, as well). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM \CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\SESSIONMANAGER\MEMORYMANAGEMENT. The DisablePagingExecutive value controls whether XP pages data from memory to the hard drive, and changing the default value of 0 to 1 turns paging off and may make general operations faster.
Changing the LargeSystemCache value from its default of 0 to 1 tells XP to keep as much of its kernel in memory as possible. Monitor its effect on 256MB systems because it can actually worsen performance by forcing very large applications to swap to disk more often. These two tweaks produced noticeably smoother performance on our testbed with only 256MB.