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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."
Start -> Run 'services.msc' Cut off most of these. Many are useless, and yet are enabled by default.
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.
My Dell laptop seemed full of crud. I know that I had installed quite a few systems just to test them over the first year that I had the laptop. And now it was showing mysterious symptoms - Programs would seem to just hang when I started them. The responsiveness seemed down.
So I wiped the hardrive and re-installed XP plus all the packages that I knew I needed. After I got it all running again, it seemed as repsonsive as when I first got it.
But that was 10 months ago. Now it is back to the same feeling of molasses at times with the inexplicable behaviour. So obviously I have installed something that has slowed things down. But what? There is no way to tell what it is. So it looks like I am headed for the yearly rebuild again.
[Note 1 that in all of this, I have been using virus protection, adware protection, software firewalls, and up-todate patches]
[Note 2 To all you people who will say wipe XP and put *nix on. I can't as I have custom software development tools that *only* run on windows. And no, it is not possible to rewrite them from scratch - and anybody who thinks so hasn't been out in the world of PLC programming and heavy industries]
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
And that includes re-formatting the partition.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Nikon slidescanner attached via FireWire; couple of years old and every now and again gets put on a new machine, scan time improve but the after all the updating both windows and Antivirus etc do suddenly slows.
Ask around, do dependancy checks run spy+ no great insight
Then a friend says "What anti-virus you use?"
"AVG, you know the free one"
"ARGHH dumpit, replace it with something else"
Turns out AVG puts some drivers into the pipeline so it can scan ethernet,USB and FireWire, so everytime the scanner sent a glob of the slide this software was checking to see if it was a virus!
And yes this continued AFTER I removed the 1364 network stuff, I even go as far as trying another card
My scanning speeds have droped from 5 mins a slide to 1.35mins, do you know how much more of a life I can have!
So have a look at device manager, choose view->devices by connection & tick hidden devices box, right near the top you'll see among much else you Antivirus drivers, some dumb some not so dumb
1)Like Lone Starr said in Spaceballs, "Take only what you need to survive". Basically only install what you need for the primary task the computer does. The more stuff you install, the slower it gets.
2)Disk Cleanup, Chkdsk, and Defragment the hard drive at least once a month. a lot of speed can be gained just by doing this regularly.
3)Protect windows like the plague. Patch to the latest revisions of Service packs, critical, and recommended updates. also use third party protection to protect against malware. Spywareblaster, Microsoft Antispyware and Grisoft AVG free edition are my personal favorites.
4)Keep system restore on and always make a restore point before you install anything. That way, if it screws up the machine after you installed it, you can uninstall it and roll the computer back to ensure that the system is totally clean of it.
5) If you got Norton ghost lying around, use it to make an image of your machine after you set it all up, that way you can roll back to that image just in case something really hoses windows.
So far, I've kept this mantra going with my machine. It's been a good 1 to 2 years since I reinstalled windows either from scratch or by ghost and I've haven't noticed any slowdown to date that I couldn't attribute to the machine getting more obsolete by the day.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I run with system restore turned off. Also clearing out your logs Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Event Viewer may or may not make a difference. You may actually try reading some of them first, but good luck making sense of them.
/AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details
Example Log Entry:
The description for Event ID ( 20158 ) in Source ( RemoteAccess ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the
The thought of using one of my own computers and not having absolute, immediate control over it, makes my skin crawl. I rule each box with an iron fist.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
As well as everything suggested above, run Crap Cleaner. This has cleaned so many gigs of junk from my computer over time, I don't know what I would do without it.
have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Most of the other tips are good, but nobody's mentioned CCleaner yet. That is one awesome app for cleaning out old cruft.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
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.
At work these two steps usually do the trick.
1. Run CCleaner. Both to find useless files AND to weed out unneeded registry entries.
2. Run Microsoft's Antispyware program.
Additionally you can run MS's antispyware program to look for unwanted apps that start at runtime.
As others have mentioned shutting down extra services you don't need may be a good idea. But in my experience those services don't effect a computer nearly as much as runaway Hard drive consumption by IE and unchecked spyware.
Go Gusties
Anyway, Windows XP tries to defrag your HD when it is idle, which could be bad. I know my work laptop, now running XP, suffered a lot more fragmentation after the upgrade from 2000 (before I turned auto defrag off). I think it has to do with the fact that either I'm working on my laptop, or its off. There is some accidental idle time in there, but only enough time to fragment the HD even worse before I resume my work. So, I turned it off, and it seems to be fragmenting normally now.
So, YMMV, I've done no quantitative analysis on this, it may be due to changing usage patterns, but if your users keep their computers busy, turning off auto defrag could help. It certainly won't make it worse then you had before the upgrade, since you're back at Windows 2000 behavior.
Another thing I thought of, but haven't tried, is set the registry size limit to something low like 1 MB, possibly cutting down on all the crud in there. I'd do it myself, but my laptop is too important to risk downtime, and the rest of my machines don't have registries.
The real path to male liberation
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.
If you want a minimal Windows install, use nLiteOS -- it creates an install CD for Windows from your existing copy, only including what you choose.
Also, remember to have a sane partitioning scheme, in case you need to reinstall. You might want to use FAT for your data partition; that way, you can read it via a Knoppix CD in a real emergency.
I'll second that. As well as the regular cleanups advocated elsewhere on this story (defrag (inc registry), prune startup crap with autoruns) you will accumulate a lot less crap if you run as non-admin.
I ripped this quote from somewhere...
START
Q. Why is Windows so insecure?
A. Because everyone runs as Administrator.
Q. Why does everyone run as Administrator (even when they know better)?
A. Because they don't understand security and are afraid they will be prevented from doing things.
Q. Why don't they understand security?
A. Because they run as Administrator, bypassing all security.
LOOP TO START
This microsoftie blog has lots of good info about running as non-admin. It can be painful to switch, but once you do, you won't regret it.
The following registry tweaks should be used with caution:E T\CONTROL\Session Manager\Memory Management\IoPageLockLimit. If it is no there you can create it. This is DWORD value. For systems with at least 256MB of RAM, 8000 hex (32768 decimal) or 10000 hex (64536 decimal). You can use 20000 hex (131072 decimal) on systems with 512MB+ of RAM. Warning: this setting may not be compatible with some drivers; especially video drivers. Enabling this option could cause critical processes and services to fail. You might not be able to log in.
E T\CONTROL\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache. If the key is not there, you can create it. This is a DWORD value. 0 for disabled. 1 for enabled.
E T\CONTROL\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive. This is a DWORD value. 0 for disabled. 1 for enabled.
IoPageLockLimit: increases the amount of pages that can be locked into memory. Changing this setting can improve performance although there is some controversy over this setting's effectiveness. Make sure that you have at least 256MB of RAM. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CONTROL\CURRENTCONTROLS
LargeSystemCache: This setting is primarily used for servers but can help improve performance. Again, it's effectiveness may be controversial. It is located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CONTROL\CURRENTCONTROLS
DisablePageExecutive: Again this is a controversial setting. You may or may not notice a difference in performance and it is driver sensitive so be forewarned about using it. It too has the potential to cause crashes after being enabled. This setting prevents kernel memory from being paged. It is located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CONTROL\CURRENTCONTROLS
Note: Any problems encountered from changing these settings will be noticed on next boot. They are a "either it's fine or it isn't" settings.
To reduce boot time, you can disable autodetection of devices on IDE controllers that have no devices connected to them. This can be done from the device manager. Also, adjust Windows for best performance and turn off the themes service.
Lastly, there's XPlite which can help cut down on some of the fat. Also, be sure to check out TweakXP.com for more XP performance tweaks. And there's nLite. Unlike XPlite, nLite allows you to remove Windows components before installation. It also has service pack integration.
If you've got multiple partitions, try installing a maintenance OS on an extra partition. If you've still got a license for Windows 2000, just install it on the other partition, it should go smoothly and give you a nice boot menu when you're done.
The main advantage of doing this is that you'll have full access to your XP installation without having any system files blocked. What I did was take a fresh install of XP (with all of my base drivers and applications installed) and make a copy of the Windows, Program Files, and Documents and Settings directories. Now, if I feel that my XP installation is getting bloated to the point where I can't fix it anymore, I can "reinstall" XP by booting into my maintenance partition and replacing those directories. As long as you are booted into another partition when you do it, Windows is completely oblivious to the fact that you've just replaced your primary OS.
Having a maintenance partition is also advantageous when defragmenting your primary partition, since no system files will be locked. It's also handy if you suspect you've been infected with a rootkit, since that seems to be a trendy topic at the moment.
A lot of the system slowdown on Windows boxes can be traced to explorer. Explorer is a single threaded application, and when used on a network, over time it tends to collect many network relative paths to resources like icons. Later the network shares dissapear or are moved. The result is, every time explorer tries to generate lists of icons to display for files it pauses - using 0% CPU - waiting for non existant network hosts to respond.
Set your Anti-virus program to scan at least weekly, and automatically update itself, Update and sca with Ad-Aware and Spybot weekly at a minimum, and update and protect with SpywareBlaster weekly at a minimum.
It is absolutely ridiculous that a person should have to do this to keep their computer running decently. We get so many Windows machines in the shop that it isn't even funny, but thusfar, whenever we have managed to convince someone to upgrade to a MacOS X machine (Typically when their Dell, Compaq, HP, E-Machines has a motherboard failure). They have came back completely excited and astonished that they don't really have to worry about spyware and viruses so much.
My reccomendation on keeping your WIndows XP machine in top performance. Go buy a high-end Mac and run VirtualPC if it can run whatever program you NEED to run (Note: Games do not count), if you cannot run your Prorgram under VPC, buy a low-end PC and keep it off the network.
+(norad) if you rearrange the letters in mother in law, you get woman hitler
Regularely doing these things:
/purgecache" to empty the system file checker cache.
Running "sfc
Emptying the folder "C:\windows\prefetch" to clean the prefecth buffer.
Defragging.
And the usual things like removing spyware etc.
I found a fast warez site: http://warez.it.kth.se
We use Startup Monitor and ZoneAlarm Security Suite software firewall. The newest ZA pops up a window the first time anything suspicious happens. It's a big problem convincing users to report the ZA popups, but if they do, Windows is much safer.
However, it's a losing battle. The problem is that Microsoft makes more money if its operating systems self-destruct. What you call "vulnerabilities" billionaires call "maximizing shareholder value".
If rich people sold good operating systems, poor people would not buy the next upgrade.
Using an operating system is like having a partner in your business. If it is a Microsoft OS, your "partners" want some things that are bad for you. If you use Linux or BSD, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief; your partners want what you want.
It's absurd that governments of countries use Microsoft products. It's even absurd that state governments in the U.S. use Microsoft products. The U.S. federal government spends more money on world-wide surveillance than any country in the history of the world. Exploiting computer systems is now one of the biggest new frontiers in surveillance.
The U.S. government's Echelon surveillance system watches everyone all the time. (Echelon quote: "Since the close of World War II, the US intelligence agencies have developed a consistent record of trampling the rights and liberties of the American people.")
The biggest discretionary expense of the U.S. government is the cost of war. The president and the vice-president of the U.S. are people who themselves and their families and friends made their money through oil and weapons. Is it any wonder that the price of oil is so high and we have war?
When a country uses Microsoft operating systems, it effectively has the U.S. government as one of its partners. Given the present climate of corruption and conflict of interest and adversarial behavior and using war as a justification for anything, why do countries want the U.S. government and U.S. billionaires as partners?
If volunteers can make a secure operating system ("Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!") is it difficult to believe that the amazing number of vulnerabilities we've seen in Windows are deliberately allowed?
A couple of tips, in case someone might not be familiar with these...
Running as a plain old User privileges may be good for some situations, but I run my XP box with Power User privileges for a bit more power. This option is not presented by the Control Panel applet, but is available through Computer Management, opened by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. Once there, go to System Tools -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups. Double-click Power Users on the right-side window and add your user account to the group.
For more info on the differences between the privilege levels, see here.
If you use applications that require admin privileges, either use the Run as... command from the right-click menus of the shortcuts (or the runas command inside the cmd shell), or modify the shortcuts permanently so clicking them always produces the dialog for entering alternate credentials: right-click an icon, choose Properties, click Advanced inside the Shortcut tab and check the box labeled Run with different credentials.
CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives can revert to using PIO mode, despite being set to use "DMA if Available." Here's how to make Windows XP redetect the DMA capabilities of the drives.
o l\ Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000x
This behaviour occurs with the following conditions:
Windows XP is the operating system
A CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or sometimes even a HDD, which is known to support DMA mode now works only in PIO mode.
The drive controller is set to use "DMA if available" but reports to be only in PIO mode.
Following is the mechanism that has worked for me, please try it at your own risk, it involves hacking the registry:
Open RegEdit
Find the following KEY:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr
The last four digits will be 0000, 0001, 0002, 0003, and so on.
Under each key, delete all occurences of the following values:
MasterIdDataChecksum
SlaveIdDataChecksum
Reboot the computer. Windows will now redetect DMA settings.
This happens if a device on the bus has been getting periodic errors either because of a hardware problem or because of scratched or copy-protected CDs. XP steps down the DMA to try and stop the errors because it assumes it is a hardware problem.
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.