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Maintaining Windows XP System Performance?
jerud wonders: "I assume that most people on Slashdot are forced to, at some point, touch Windows. Further, I assume that many of them are forced to administer Windows boxes. I am in the unfortunate situation of using Windows for about 90% of my tasks, due to the nature of my job. As a firm believer in 'if it isn't broke don't fix it', I've delayed moving to XP for just about as long as possible, holding onto my Windows 2000 installation, while my brother spent a lot of time complaining about the XP issues he dealt with, at work. Finally, I made the transition and, low and behold, it didn't seem to bad. In fact, there were a few things that I really liked. Now, a few years later I have quite a few XP machines and they all share the same problem: over time they have slowed so noticeably that they have made even the most solid configurations run like they were made in 1999. Is there any regular treatment out there that can minimize this kind of system degradation?"
"Solid practices are in use on most of these machines, or at least the ones that are completely under my control. Even with that, I know these machines are much slower now then when I bought them. I really don't want to spend two weekends every year starting over from scratch, simply because thats the only way to reclaim performance."
defragment your hard drive. Of course, you can't defrag the registry. So use sysinternal's PageDefrag utility which can. Over time, the registry accumulates a lot of stuff, and defragging it can help quite a bit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml - it's a freeware app that tells you each time something tries to register itself to run at startup. Those damn on-startup apps are what slow the machine down the most, especially for non-technical home users. You'll be amazed at how many things believe they must run every time you start your computer.
I actually got sick of family and friends asking me to tune up their XP installs, so I wrote a detailed article on the entire process and posted it on our family website here: http://www.farleyfamily.net/articles/tuneup/
It's a comprehensive step-by-step of what any aunt or uncle should be able to follow in order to free system resources and make for a better (faster!) desktop experience.
Run msconfig. Despite what your better judgement might say, you can safely disable everything in the startup tab. Then glance through the list and recheck anything that you can both identity and wish to have running in the background.
Other small speedups:
Switch to the classic win2k theme.
If your wallpaper is a gif or jpeg, replace it with a bmp and disable active desktop. For anything other than bmps, it uses Internet Explorer to render your desktop.
Get more ram.
If less than about 20% disk free, delete stuff you don't need and then defrag.
Disable window animations and other eye candy.
Check for malware.
Install and run ShellExView. Some programs install shell extensions which can (but not usually) cause slowdowns and pauses in Windows Explorer. It should color code items depending on if they come with windows, if they are known, if they are known to be bad, or if they are unknown. I encountered a system where a Eudora shellexecute hook was causing the system to freeze for 2 minutes whenever you tried to start a program.
Disable the indexing service.
Disable/uninstall your virus scanner, if you're the type who never installs viruses.
16bit color is sometimes faster. You'll have to test for yourself.
Sometimes I get lucky with this one: In control panel->hardware->device manager, open the properties for the "Primary IDE Channel" and see whether it's in DMA or PIO mode. If it's in PIO mode, right click the "Primary IDE Channel" and click remove/uninstall, and reboot. I've encountered several systems where this was the cause of major slowdown. Windows occasionally encounters timeouts reading from the hard drive, and sometimes mistakingly assumes that stepping down to a slower transfer mode will solve the problem. I see it happen most on systems that go to sleep a lot. Microsoft's website says it's fixed, and shouldn't happen much at all in the future, but you'll still need to do the fix I described on systems that already have the problem.
Some people suggest removing System Restore. I've had occasions where it helped out a lot, like when a Microsoft Windows Update badly broke my system, so I can't recommend disabling it unless you don't mind the occasional reinstall.
I'm typing this on Linux, so some of the above instructions might be slightly off, but are generally correct.