System Performace Tweaking?

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "After being on a rather slow PC for some time now, I have finally made the jump to a 1GHz+ PC. Being fairly new at having a rather fast PC, I am not very sure where to go for system performance tweaking. A few friends pointed me to Monroe World and TweakXP. Both are pretty good sites, however I find that my system still doesn't perform as well as it should when running a benchmarking test like 3dMark 2003. My score is just under 2000. I know people who have slower systems than mine and get a score around 5000. So I am turning to the Slashdot community to ask: Where do you go to find out the latest and greatest hardware and system tweaks? Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?"

Comments

Another "must do" tweak

[Motherfucking Shit]

Here's another "good computing practice" tip that I can add to the list of great suggestions in the parent post: keep your desktop small.

I've found that with nearly any version of Windows, the bulkier your desktop, the slower your performance. I'm not just talking about the icons that appear on your desktop, I'm talking about all of the files contained within your "desktop" directory (e.g. c:\%windir%\desktop, c:\documents and settings\%profile%\desktop, etc).

Keep the contents of your desktop to an absolute minimum. Again, this doesn't mean create a folder on the desktop and move all your crud in there; that won't help, as those files are still in your Windows desktop directory. It's not about what shows on your desktop, it's about what's inside your desktop directory.

Move non-essentials out of the desktop completely. I've "treated" complete dog systems whose only real problem, aside from an adware app or two, was the fact that the owner had no concept of drive structure, and placed every file he owned somewhere within his desktop. I've seen machines with literally 20 gigs worth of files in the desktop directory. The solution is as simple as creating c:\My Stuff, moving the gigs worth of cruft from the desktop there, rebooting, and - as Emeril would say - BAM! Kick it up a notch, it's like booting a brand new computer.

My Windows desktops typically have five items: My Computer, My Documents*, My Network Places, Recycle Bin, and a shortcut to PuTTy (if I didn't run PuTTy so damned often, even that wouldn't be there). Period. Sure, it's more convenient to have your 20 gig MP3 collection and shortcuts to all your apps right there on the desktop, but this will slow you down like crazy. I don't know why, but it does, and it always has.

Trim down your desktop and you'll speed yourself up :)

*Remember that stuff in My Documents winds up within your desktop. Keep that clean as well. I strongly recommend a c:\My Stuff directory as a repository for your saved documents, pictures, and miscellaneous junk; just pretend that My Documents doesn't exist.

Some tweaks...

[Hard_Code]

Here are some tweaks I remember doing on my w2k system (search google for actual details).

* Turn off all unnecessary services (I have like, 3 services started automatically, and a few on manual which automatically turn themselves on. Remember, do NOT "disable" RPC services, you will be hella screwed. Also, I found if you turn off "protected storage", then BASIC Auth in IE will take like 5 minutes...go figure)

* I seem to recall doing some registry tweak to turn on DMA for my cd rom

* There are well known disk cache, and nt kernel paging registry tweaks...only really necessary if you are limited on RAM.

* Get a utility with which you can modify your "Startup" items (not in the start menu, but in the registry). Lots of sneaky programs like to hide shit in there and start up every single freaking time (no thank you Quicktime!).