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I've been tweaking any box I run that requires Windows using recommendations from Black Viper for YEARS! It's a handy resource. It's amazing seeing everything that is running in the background.

Agreed.

But if one is forced I've always liked Black Vipers Window's Service Configuration Guides

i.e.

* Windows 10
* Windows 7 SP1
etc.

--
Microsoft UI retards: Where is the < 100% font scaling option? Custom scaling?? Config per monitor???

Agreed.

But if one is forced I've always liked Black Vipers Window's Service Configuration Guides

i.e.

* Windows 10
* Windows 7 SP1
etc.

--
Microsoft UI retards: Where is the < 100% font scaling option? Custom scaling?? Config per monitor???

Agreed.

But if one is forced I've always liked Black Vipers Window's Service Configuration Guides

i.e.

* Windows 10
* Windows 7 SP1
etc.

--
Microsoft UI retards: Where is the < 100% font scaling option? Custom scaling?? Config per monitor???

Funny I have noticed slows downs with windows 7 with upgrades. The culprit being the habit of upgrades turning on unused services which inevitably slow the system down, this especially if you tend to tweak services (disabled, manual, auto, using guides like http://www.blackviper.com/ ), to better manage performance. M$ often, tend to reset services to default settings, less so now than before. Requiring a review of service settings to get performance back.

So likely they simply need to review the services running on those systems and turn off the unnecessary ones. Also the delayed boot for many services can cause, 'perceived' performance issues ie the system appears to be up and running but some services you need to run might still be waiting to boot but you run your application and it runs horribly as back ground services are still booting up, this performance impression is then left behind in the users mind and they become more sensitive to other delays (M$ also did tend to shift more services to delayed start in upgrades).

That problem is caused by M$ seeking to B$ their way through boot up speed tests by simply not completing the process and pretending for tests results it has been done. This forces new tests, no longer to desktop but say from switch on to a website completed loaded in say Firefox. So they might have good to the desktop quicker but that affect was destroyed by slower launching of their applications.

http://www.blackviper.com/serv... I've used it and don't experience any apparent slowdowns even on older ULV notebook processors.

I just cleaned up a new Gateway laptop. The amount of pre-installed stuff I wasn't interested in is comparable to what was on a ThinkPad I setup last week. From the Gateway, I removed:

Adobe Air
Bing Bar
E-Bay Worldwide
Evernote
Foozkids
Foozkids Platform
Gateway Games
Gateway MyBackup
Gateway Registration
Gateway Recovery Management
Gateway ScreenSaver
Gateway Updater
Identity Card
Kobo
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition
Nero DiscSpeed 10
Nero SmartStart 10
Nero Update
Norton Internet Security
Norton Online Backup
Skype
Welcome Centre
Windows Live Essentials

I also change the branded home page in Internet Explorer, and disable or remove all the browser add-ons I don't want, including "accelerators" such as "Map with Bing", "Translate with Bing", etc. After all that, there are still programs starting up automatically that I don't want, which I disable using "msconfig". And we haven't even mentioned the numerous services running that may not be required. (A good guide to disabling services can be found here).

I often tell people that buying a new computer these days is like buying a new car that comes with 500 lbs. of sand in the trunk.

Another path to travel is the OS tweaking path. Assuming you have the admin rights needed... If not, hey, its may-day. tell the admin stuff that the proletarian movement demand more control over the means of production. Assuming its a Redmond spawned code were talking about, start by turning off some resource-hogging features like error reporting and fast user switching. Check out http://www.blackviper.com/category/guides/ for a list of services you can safely disable. Consider creating a trimmed hardware profile where some of the services and the drivers will be disabled. Last but not least, even though you seem fond of glitzy UI elements, try to disable some of the fade-in-while-i-yawn features. Most times you will not even see the difference, and the benefit in reduced mem. footprint is not trivial.
Another thing to consider is Flash. Minimize the number of flash\video\shockwave (etc.) instances to the required min. (i.e. - block ads and don't open more than 951 Youtube flicks @ once).
Using mem. management software may help or may even hinder. Its a trial-n-error process. No one solution (that I'm aware of) fits all configurations and usage patterns.
I've had some luck setting up some pretty neat 512MB and even 256MB systems. I even ran a proof-of-patience system for a while using XPsp2(or 3) Office 2003 and IE7(or 8 - I guess I suppressed these memories) with a mere 64MB of ram, I think Win2K would not even install under such conditions.
I repent!
Now... You can secretly bring along a Linux-on-a-stick and simply do most of your browsing from there. If you won't tell I won't.

> Try to disable as many services or daemons as you can to free up RAM. In the Microsoft world,

Uh, MSCONFIG is a band-aid "solution" (although a fast partial one. :-) One really should be disabling all non essential services.

e.g. and scroll down, set Show entries to 100, and use the "SAFE" or "Tweaked" column ...
http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-service-pack-3-service-configurations/

I run Windows 7 on my my new Revo box 64-bit 2core, 4GB, Nvidia, 500GB Hard Drive. Runs so slow. I spent £300 on it because of lies like yours.

Alrighty. I run Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 1520 with 64 bit dual core, 4GB (aftermarket), Nvidia and 120GB Hard Drive. Bought it in Feb 08 with XP on it. This was during the reign of Vista and this was the only laptop Dell still sold with XP on it.

Got hit by a virus (damn AVG Free did not protect me; even though I scanned the suspect file thoroughly before trying to use it. Switched to Avira, we'll see how that does ;D) and had to re-install. I had already tried Win7 during RC and decided it is marginally better than XP, just not better enough to switch unless you're rolling a new OS anyway.. and now I was. So I switched from 32 bit XP to 64 bit 7.

Now it seems to run every bit as fast as XP did, with Aero turned on. It eats more RAM (900MB used at startup instead of 350MB, overhead appears constant after days of uptime) and this is after applying most of Black Viper's recommended service tweaks to both OSen. I find win+tab is handy when you've got a ton of browser windows open (each with tabs; I generally run one window per distinct project) and want to quickly get to one which is visually distinct.

so tuppe, does my counter-example anecdote mean that you're the liar now? Or perhaps we should yeild the predictive power of all of our personal one-off experiences in favor of actual research?

ZDnet's benchmarks maintain that Windows 7 is faster than XP for standard use, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.

Maximum PC's benchmarks claim that Win7 simply feels faster than XP on the hardware they tested.

Tom's Hardware's netbook benchmarks show that Windows 7 does not beat XP on the netbook but that it is quite responsive, and would probably surpass XP with better driver support.

TechRadar's benchmark includes many plusses and minuses for Windows 7 with a net plus, but clearly states that it provides "better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware."

I'm not picking up on any benchmarks that have the same trouble you've had, so unfortunately I have no way to confirm you did not just misconfigure your machine.

Don't think so. I'm currently using an ASUS EEE 1000HE (N280 I believe). I have no issues with flash videos stuttering for SD content (pretty sure Hulu uses flash throughout). Bear in mind I have wiped off XP Home, upgraded to 2GB of RAM and installed XP Pro, additionally disabling the services I don't use on a daily basis. Prior to the re-install and disabling of services the stutter was there and quite pronounced. Google Earth gave me problems (rendered horribly slow) prior to the re-install as well, now works great. For those who don't know which services to turn off... Deal with the stuttering. If you are still brave enough to try, this is a good beginners guide to disabling some of the services in question (stick to the "SAFE" configuration): http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm Honest opinion; I have a Quad-core "dream machine" I built that is useless save for gaming and re-encoding video now. I typically only use the netbook and my HTPC.

I think you're pushing people towards this site, or another like it.

I found BV's list years ago and it helped me turn off a lot of services that I didn't need. I was under the impression that my copy of WindowsXP was faster and more stable than other peoples'.
At least, it got to 7 years old without needing to be reformatted and reinstalled. Pretty good for Windows if you ask me.

I stopped using Windows a couple of years ago so it doesn't matter to me now, but for all those people that haven't gone Linux yet this site can help keep your box up a bit longer.

I have a 733MHz with 384MB of PC100 and XP runs great. Are you actually trying to run the default install? Because the default install of ANY MSFT OS is crap. Go get a copy of NLite or XP ISO Builder and make you a nice unattended with all the crap services turned off and see the difference.

If you don't know which services to kill here is a nice easy to follow list. But with 192MB you might be better running Win2K as I've found the lowest "sweet spot" for XP is 256MB, whereas Win2K plays nice with 128MB. But please don't torture yourself with WinME. Is your self esteem low or something that you would want to flog yourself with that evil OS? I'm sure that whatever you've done in the past surely isn't worth THAT level of punishment. Just forgive yourself and move on.

Black Viper's stuff is iffy at best these days, too. I strongly doubt that it makes much of a difference anymore.

That, and he's batfuck insane.

If Ubuntu is looking to unseat Windows, why do they need a SQL server and a directory service? Granted I use Apache and MySQL on my Mac so I can develop on the road, but not everyone does.

I use Black Viper's Windows services tutorial to decide what I can do without on XP. It makes a pretty decent difference in both RAM and CPU usage.

I would vote for Win2K Pro. I am running it on a desktop with almost the same specs and even with many programs running in the background it is still very snappy. And if you further tweak it by going to a site like Blackvipers services list and turning off anything you don't need it can be very conservative on RAM and CPU cycles.

I agree that a leaner OS is a good thing -- however that is accomplished. I also think that separating these apps from the OS would allow them to be updated and improved independently (and presumably more often).

But I think that when most people describe Windows as "bloated", they are referring not to applications (which consume resources when run and then go away when closed), but to startup processes and services which the average user has little control over. What would be really nice would be a fool-proof, baked-in version of Black Viper's Windows service guide. That way, users could control exactly what is running on their box without having to worry about shooting themselves in the foot.

... Reboot and WGA will never bother you again.

Okay, that's not bad - skip update(s) you don't like. How about just skipping *all* updates? Here's my approach - we'll see if it turns out I'm a moron, or not ...

Install FF. Never run IE (any rev) again. Install NoScript. Be fascistic about not running JS on pages. Go to Black Viper's page ( http://www.blackviper.com/ ). You'll find others beyond that. Use BV and others to turn off every damn service you can manage. And then turn off a few more. :)

Put all data you give any sort of a kentucky about into a Truecrypt partition. I should probably change this to full disk encryption using Truecrypt. Get the sysinternals utilities so you can tell what's going on in your system. Get a Rootkit Revelaer-type utility. Install Avast! (optional if you're not a bonehead about running shit you shouldn't). Ditto for Spybot. Run HijackThis on a regular interval.

Install and run Open Office instead of MS Office.

Put stuff you care about - like on-line banking - into an environment you have more trust in. For example, for on-line banking, I launch a vmplayer Damn Small Linux virtual machine that suspends on shutdown, so when it fires up it is running FF and has loaded my bank's page (takes about 11 steamboats to launch and let me start entering my bankcard number).

I run behind a Tilgin broadband router.

Windows Firewall is shutdown (in fact it won't run because of required services behind it being shut down - thanks, BV). Automatic Updates are also turned off.

Or, if you can, avoid this hassle and dump Windows. For example, switch to Ubuntu. I have *one* app left, and it is getting converted to a web interface, so Ubuntu here we come. And yes. I am aware that Ubuntu will come with its own administrative overhead.

The Black Viper... he'll tell us what to do! (Note: This is a Windows based memory improvement site.)

You can significantly reduce the amount of memory that Vista uses by tweaking the startup services. I stumbled across an excellent site that has a table of all the default Vista services and what they do, with a categorized breakdown of what you should and should not disable.

Wow, I've never seen anyone take such a scathing critique so well. I salute you in your humbleness. If I could take criticism as well as you can I would count myself as a better man.

Acronis and Google desktop are just 3rd party versions of system restore and indexer. Even if they don't require as much disk time, which is arguable, they still eat up quite a bit of disk time. Open up your task manager and display the columns "Page Faults" and "Page Faults Delta", maybe it's called PF Delta. A page fault is when a program can't find the data it's looking for in memory, it must look up the data from the disk. This isn't the exact definition but good enough for gauging disk usage. Find the program that has the most page faults, that's the program that thrashes your disk the most. For instance you'll see explorer with a page fault delta of 1 at all times. That's explorer checking the content of your 'desktop' folder to see if it has changed. Open up two folders, you'll see two PF deltas, unless you have explorer instance per window set, in which case you'll see two explorer.exe's with 1 PF delta each. Now 1 PF delta is no big deal, 100,000 PF Delta is a big deal.

As far as running with no page file, I've run XP32 and XP64 with 2GB and 4GB respectively with no page file for years and have never experienced a BSOD that wasn't obviously related to some other piece of hardware (DAMN NVIDIA!). I'm running vista64 with 4GB and no page file since it came out in January and have never had a non nvidia BSOD (DAMN NVIDIA AGAIN!). Thankfully Nvidia has cleaned up their driver a lot and I haven't had a BSOD since then. Regardless, if you shut off the swap and run out of memory XP and Vista give a nice little dialog that literally says "Out of Memory". I've also ran into a problem where, with really old video cards, vista ran out of video memory and therefore could not produce the dialog that says "Out of Memory". This is unrelated to system memory though, and only happened on a older Dell quadro workstation, again more Nvidia crap drivers.

If you really want to tweak vista into the lean and mean gaming machine you know it can be check this site out: http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm. This guy seems pretty through in his tweaking, I found it while searching for a guide on services I can safely turn off, though I shut them all off anyhow just to see what would happen. Ahh, reminds me of the days when me and my buddies would get in PSKILL wars and shut off processes remotely, of course someone would always shut off the system process instead of just cmd.exe or explorer.exe and end the game prematurely.

If you want to show me some benchmarks that show I'm full of shit I'm down to read it, and I may even change my mind if your arugment is good enough, but I've been doing this for a pretty long time and don't pick fights I can't win.

And fuck crysys, that game sucks even if it does run well. I shoot a korean guy from 300 meters with a 7.62 round and he just jerks back, then looks at me as if I insulted his mother. So I shoot 5 or 6 more times, nothing. Then I remember that the guns do-not-work if you are further than 150 meters away. I just want to know, who the fuck thinks that's cool? Or realistic in any way? Most combat with rifles takes place at 300 meters or more, a lot more if you have optics, but crysys has this idea that bullets are just not effective at ranges over 150 meters. Maybe they thought they were modeling airsoft guns.

I like ARMA. Crappy UI, shitty graphics, poor controls, but very realistic. If you get shot, at all, you're probably dead.

Looking forward to those benchmarks!

Windows 2000 Indexing Service?

Don't get me wrong - it isn't an 'amazing' solution or anything, but your example could have been better, perhaps.

To say (almost) everything MS does is a step backward or the same, is foolish. MS is staffed with talented people and good ideas DO come out of Redmond. To think that their software is de-evolving somehow is just silly anti-MS stuff. Granted, the general direction of the company doesn't seem to have much momentum, but they really have improved the experience with a lot of their products over the past several years... Although they've certainly effed up some things too.

Now, are they innovative? That's something else. I've seen some pretty interesting projects by MS but I'm sure they are (mostly) the products of other people's ideas. It's clear that MS has chosen to improve upon their own or other's ideas... And if that's the route they want to go, then so be it. But obviously that's a dinosaur model of doing business and only time will tell if that's going to be satisfactory for them or not.

Ah but you're missing the trick. In the Open source world if a hand full of people are having a problem it only takes the one masochist to solve it and post the fix on line. Why would he post the fix on line? Any number of reasons, but the 'why' does not matter it only matters that the fix is posted. Windows has the same masochists. They sit there and poke Windows until it bleeds and go 'look what I did!' But with out being able to see the code these very important masochists are crippled and can't gain the same level of information the Linux masochists can.

BlackViper(http://www.blackviper.com/) is one such Windows masochist. He has poked and prodded every windows service so he can figure out what to turn off for a faster PC.

I use TuneUp.com's product to fine tune all the aspects of Windows XP which include stylized settings for the desktop to take on a new look and feel.

These apps that are mentioned sound like a fun distraction for a while but if you are concerned that running 3rd party apps will chew too much CPU then check out

black viper

for an indepth look at windows xp services and which ones can be disabled. This site shows you how to make different hardware configurations (eg. gaming mode hardware settings or work mode come settings to mind). Not being educated on how to operate a MAC, I don't know if such a thing exists for it.

Why do PC users always respect MAC users but this is not vice versa? The right tool for the job if you asked me.

Do some research and you'll find you don't need a service pack to tune Vista:

I agree...Black Viper to the rescue. I printed out his list of services for XP and still use it to this day when tweaking systems for friends/family.

Do some research and you'll find you don't need a service pack to tune Vista:

I agree...Black Viper to the rescue. I printed out his list of services for XP and still use it to this day when tweaking systems for friends/family.

Why isn't there a third party service that will advice corporations which components of Windows could be safely removed by looking at the company policies and use patterns?

I ordered a Dell notebook recently with XP Home - cut a few $$ off the price since Dell ain't shipping with Ubuntu in my country (yet). XP is now confined to a 20GB partition for use on "foreign jobs".

One thing I noticed is that after removing all the crapware, XP bells & whistles and tweaked the services (including the ream of services and process that make up the Intel PRO wireless bloat) I had a lean and efficient OS.

If they chose to, I'm sure MS would sell more copies of Windows Fundamentals than some flavors of Vista. The egg on face may hurt their pride, however.

Sure Vista can be slow but then running vista on 512mb of ram is like running XP on 128mb's, something you shouldn't do.

On my XP box, one of the first things I do is visit the Black Viper and figure out what processes I can disble so they aren't wasting memory. What I want is a lightweight OS, not an OS plus a software package with a bunch of stuff I neither need nor want. But that's what Microsoft sells, software bundles that you have to take if you want their OS. (Which I don't actually want, but I want the game software that runs on it. I don't need anything else that's Windows exclusive that I can think of... well, except Death Note and I can get that on DVD so there is an option. Even now Windows is still the most Free serious gaming platform, compared to the gimped, locked-down game consoles.)

Oh, I must bow to their monopoly in the long run, but I won't buy Vista until I'm forced to.

For one thing, since Win32 doesn't have setuid, it uses a privileged local service for such programs instead. A lot of the services are local only. Something like a device support service would naturally be local only. Of the remotely reachable services that start automatically by default in XP SP2, they either can't be turned off or are indeed on to be convenient.

Windows NT was designed for LANs in which a central authority can control all the computers and ask them for information, so the Local Security Authority service always listens for authorized network requests. The only way to make it unreachable from the network is using a firewall. LSA's design prevents it from being used by unprivileged users, but implementation flaws in it have fueled worms in the past.

In NT4, RPC became a necessary service because certain internal components started using it for local RPC. It's possible to disable the remote transports via the registry. RPC has been the source of multiple vulnerabilities, both on Windows and various UNIXes.

The computer browser is enabled by default to be convenient, and can be helpful any time you're connected to a network. The Server service enables file and printer sharing, and most users expect it to be on. Remote registry goes with the central admin design, but should probably be off. Some sites recommend turning all of these off. They haven't been vulnerable in the past AFAIK.

Lots of services are set to manual and only get started on demand. For example, if you set the Help and Support Center service to manual, it'll only be started when you open the Help and Support Center. Each service has a security descriptor which controls the users that are allowed to start and stop a service: most allow any interactive user to start them. This site has a good overview of services and lists a conservative configuration. It isn't all that far from the Microsoft default config for the automatic starting of network services. Unfortunately, the worst offenders can't really be disabled and most malware gets in via privileged users running arbitrary binaries, not network worms.

Did you try going to 'Run' and typing 'services.msc'? From here you can see all the services that start up with windows, and disable or stop them.

http://www.blackviper.com/BlackViper used to have all the windows processes listed and which ones you could remove safely. I think his site has been down for a while, but try Google.

http://www.blackviper.com/

Here's a useful link for securing Windows Systems: Black Viper.com

it's been disabled by default in the XP SP2 installations i've done. this page backs this up. just fyi. (so if people update to SP2, or buy a new installation of windows, it won't work, unless of course that service is needed for some program they use and they or the network admin turns it on).

I've always "tuned" my systems. In windows, this means setting certain services to "disabled", removing useless programs from the Startup, and checking a few registry keys. Very handy link - blackviper

Without Antivirus, how do you know it's "clean as a whistle"? It's kind of a schrodinger's cat scenario; you haven't looked.

That's not the point. Windows is more like an abandoned building with open doors and windows, and wait! It has a friggin' bag of CAT FOOD inside. This isn't Schroedinger's cat... it's much more like "Garfield and Friends".

If Windows had been truly well-designed, we wouldn't need antiviruses IN THE FIRST PLACE.

In my times, you caught a virus because you copied some friend's warez game floppy. NOT because you accidentally left your PC connected to the internet.

Wanna know why windows sucks?

*AHEM!* (clears throat)

I searched about "automatic" services on windows. For instance, almost all of the windows services run on something called RPC (Remote Procedure Call service - and this means network). And many of them are turned on by default (unless you're BlackViper, and 99.9% of the Windows users haven't even heard of the guy).

Furthermore, the default protocol for networks is TCP/IP, meaning anyone can access your network (or machine) directly from the internet. There's no "drawbridge" that could be turned off or something to keep you safe.

Windows is naturally an INTERNET-VULNERABLE operating system. Is it the Joe users' fault that his machine is practically a virus lighthouse with lotsa services running on the background, listening to specific ports, _AND_ being vulnerable to buffer overflows, for Norton's sake?

Furthermore. BillyGates and company, have always had this "run code on data" fetish. Why do you think Microsoft Word viruses came to life? A text file cannot infect your machine because it's data, not code.

And don't get me started on ActiveX, i'm sick enough of this filth and i just finished eating.

It's a Celeron 300 running stripped down Windows XP. I have a decent ATI 7500 AIW so I also have TV out here. I've upgraded the RAM to 512MB. I did lose a hard drive a couple of years ago(no problem as I back up my data to my server in my home office), but other than that the thing has been on for 5 years straight. I leave the case open(like most of my PC's, should probably close them but I'm constantly moving parts etc.) I blow out the cobwebs, dust and wood chips every couple months or so.

Works great, although lately I've been thing about upgraded to 1 Ghz or so.

How may I ask did you turn off the swap file?

If you have enough RAM and lighten up the Windows memory footprint by disabling all of the crap, Windows won't turn it back on. I run most of my boxen with 512MB and no swap. Occasionally, I have to turn it on in order to do photo editing but that is rare. Check out Black Viper for more info on tweaking.

*cough*

my default box uses gentoo

when i use windows, i prefer to keep it as free of bloat as possible: hence, i turn most services off by default (you can do that, you know, with some tips from places such as blackviper's guide). because i eschew bloat, overburdening memspace, and a rather ugly interface, even for windows, i avoid crapware like itunes/windows.

leave it to a machead fanboi to assume certain things about other users and blindly try to convert others to their side by confusing a media player and an operating system.

is that it is inbound-only.

The folks that are having problems with SP2 are the same ones for whom the Windows "firewall" is inadequate.
Their boxes are already infected with spyware.
That causes problems with SP2 (and they are already phoning home from malware that is already in place).

As always, get a firewall that has egress blocking.
On Joe Average's one-boxen system that means Sygate Personal Firewall (now the prefered app)
or an old version of ZoneAlarm (the new ones add bloat without adding significant functionality).
http://www.oldversion.com--Caution:The scroll bars at this site lock up my Gecko browser.


Re: SP2
The best results are obtained by a clean install of XP, install SP2, and follow Thomas C. Greene's configuration advice.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/02/winxpsp2_s ecurity_review
[Our previous column] "was NOT a practical guide to hardening a Windows system".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/reg_reader s_windows
XP Home this time:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/17/xphome_sp2
Programs that have problems with SP2:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884 130&product=windowsxpsp2

For reference: Black Viper's SP1 page
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm%20
(Dontcha just love the way MICROS~1 allows spaces in file names?)


The 2nd-best results can be had by running multiple malware killers, installing SP2, and following Greene.

gewg_

Anyone who has a Linux system keeps their number of open ports to an absolute minimum, usually 'sshd' and 'http', unlike XP systems which still have a gadzillion services open, despite every attempt to shut them down, which makes the system unstable (there's good advice at black viper

First, let me say that Thomas C. Greene is one of my favorite writers.

It strikes me that someone who has used something like Black Viper's SP1 Configuration page to tighten up his Windoze box is going to have all of that effort wiped out when he installs SP2.

No one should install SP2 without a checklist like Greene's to go back over his settings and adjust them manually.
Anybody working on a .REG file that implements all Greene's recommendations?

gewg_

This is why I followed the instructions in
Black Viper's winxp service configuration guide.

Turns off major security holes (*presses lots of backspaces*) ahem, "services" in SP1.

(I just wonder - for WHOM are those services made? The user or the hacker? :-P )

I have been having this problem on my Inspiron ever since I installed SP2. I have tried a lot of things, and I highly suggest http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm for tweaking your services settings.
Another way to boost your speed is hanging your Prefetch setting, http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6270_11-5165773.h tml has a great article on how to do it.
TCPOptimizer http://darkedge.levels4you.com/review.l4y?file=20 also helped speed up my collection a lot.
Another cool tip is fixing Event ID 4226 which limits your connections in SP2, check it out at http://www.lvllord.de/?url=tools#4226patch.
And, of course get the MS TweakUI for XP at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx.
And although they are not freeware I actually bought and really like Registry First Aid http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/reg1aid/ and Registry Compactor http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/RegistryCompactor/ .

I hope you all have as much success as I have with spedding up XP. It is a pain in the butt to do it, but it is worth it in the end.

Also, shut down all that extra crud that Microsoft enabled by default for the few users that might think about using it some day. You'll have more free memory (or less junk in the pagefile) and be less vulnerable to remote attacks as well. These packages might do this kind of thing for you, but most likely they are just snake-oil relying on the placebo effect and a "no-refund" clause.

For any part that says "disable unused services", don't forget to check out XP Service Config Guide by Black Viper.

The best site for disabling XP services is Black Viper. There's a description of each service and a recommendation based on your usage (gaming, safe, default, etc..).

No, it's not valid in XP. WinME is from the old 9x code base; XP is from the NT code base, two completely different architectures. The .ini files are not used for anything in NT based operating systems; everything is stored in the registry. Stopping unnecessary services is a good way to save memory in XP.

It would commit less memory if your turned off unnecessary services; without them, its more like 50mb. I've run XP with 128mb without problems.

Check out www.blackviper.com, it's one of the better sites dedicated to tuning and increasing performance of Windows 2000/XP