Disk Performance Monitor

The performance monitor for hard drives is turned on by default. You can disable all disk monitoring by running this command

DISKPERF -N

To turn it on again run this and and

DISKPERF -YD

App/boot Defrag

Force all of your most commonly used applications to the edge of the hard drive for faster access.

start -->Run defrag c: -b

Move your pagefile to secondary drive

If you have a secondary drive in your system it is a good idea to put your pagefile on the non windows drives.

1.) Right Click My Computer and select properties.
2.) Advanced tab --> Performance, settings box
3.) Advanced --> Virtual Memory, Change
4.) set the pagefile on the secondary drive.

You can either have a pagefile on each drive or you can set the main drive to have no paging file. I suggest only using a pagefile on a secondary drive.

PageFile Fragmentation.

Many people have talked about this quite a bit and there's also many people selling applications that claim to do this. It's simply a scam. I do not believe the pagefile really gets fragmented badly since it only caches recently used stuff that couldn't fit into the memory. If you believe your pagefile gets fragmented then the best solution is to delete the pagefile on shutdown and reboot about once a week or as you see fit.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"ClearPageFileAtShutdown"="1"

Reduce Recycle Bin size

By default the Recycle bin can eat up 10% of your hard drive. By allocating less space for this you will be keep more free disk space which can improve performance if properly defragmented.

1.) Right Click on the Recycle bin click on properties
2.) Global Tab
3.) Click Use one setting for all drives
4.) Move the slider to the left to allocate less space. If you have a larger drive you could easily go down as low as 3% but for smaller drives I wouldn't suggest using less than 5%

Moving My Documents location

It is a good idea to move the location of "My Documents" to a secondary drive if you have one.

1.) Right click on My Documents and click properties
2.) Click the move button and select where you want "My Documents" moved to.

Moving the Print Spool

This can only help you if the printer is on your system and you have multiple hard drives in your system. If you print quite a bit of stuff moving your print spool to whichever drive windows is not installed on is a good idea.

1.) Create a new folder on that drive called print
2.) Go to Start --> Settings --> Printers and Faxes -->
3.) Click File --> Server Properties --> Advanced tab
4.) You'll see a box called Spool folder in that box enter the location of the directory you created earlier. Probably D:\print

Memory Performance

Improving memory performance can be done simply by preventing your hard drive from being used for cache. This is only useful with 256Mb or more of RAM.

Everything that you'll need to edit here can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management

So of course add

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] to your *.reg file.

Disable Paging Executive
This will prevent pages sections from RAM going to the hard drive. If you have a large amount of RAM at least 256Mb (I suggest 512) you might want to keep the data in your RAM to improve your performance considerably due to reduced amount of hard drive swappage. The entry that you will want to modify is called DisablePagingExecutive. Changing this from 0 to 1 will keep the data in your RAM. (can cause 'Delayed Write Failed' errors on some machines and renders it unbootable except in safe mode which you can UNDO this tweak in safemode)

"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

DisablePagingExecutive registry key is set to 1 which means Drivers and the kernel must remain in physical memory. The default is 0 which allows this data to be cached to disk sometimes. Forcing all of this information to stay in your RAM is a good idea, but can be bad for the people with 128Mb of RAM.

System Cache Boost
The XP kernel can be loaded into your RAM with a simple registry edit. This can greatly improve performance since the NT Kernel will always be in your RAM. With this edit you will allocate roughly 4Mb of your RAM for the kernel. Sometimes more RAM is used but most of the time it is only 4Mb. The entry that you will need to find is called LargeSystemCache and you'll need to change this from 0 to 1 in order to enable this. (can cause 'Delayed Write Failed' errors on some machines and renders it unbootable except in safe mode which you can UNDO this tweak in safemode)

"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

To put both of these RAM tweaks into use you'll add something like this to your reg file

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

Disable Virtual Memory

• Right click my computer
• Click the advanced tab
• Click the settings button under performance
• Click the advanced tab
• Click change by Virtual Memory
• If you have more than 512Mb of RAM I suggest you click no paging file
• Click set then ok 3 times and you'll need to reboot

This may cause your system to quit booting

DirectX based games that use large textures will often times NOT be able to run even when you have 512Mb of RAM.

Adobe products also have problems with this it seems at ANY RAM size. It's worth trying but if your adobe programs quit working afterwards this will most likely be the reason.

If you experience any problems or slow downs then create a STATIC pagefile which means it is always the same filesize. To do this set both the minimum and maximum size to the same number.

RAM Drive

There's all kinds of goodies you can do when you have tons of RAM. One of them is creating a drive that loads things into your RAM. For all the information you'll want to visit Microsoft's support pages that details this better than I can in the small space. MS support pages info

The only limitation is that the drive can only be 32MB in size. :(

IO Page Lock Limit

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"IoPageLockLimit"

No copy/paste here cause you need to use your head!
Specifies the maximum number of bytes that can be locked for I/O operations. If you have < 64Mb it should be RAM size - 7Mb. For 64Mb-500Mb it should be RAM size - 16Mb. For 512Mb and greater it should be RAM size minus 64Mb. This is a tweak that I did not include in my tweaking guide, but I will in the next revision due to so many people not using this properly.

Launch Folder Windows in separate Process

I only suggest using this tweak if you have 512Mb of RAM or more on your system. It'll open each instance of explorer in its own process. This takes up more RAM but when you're jumping back and forth between quite a few folders to clean your drive up it can make things a bit speedier.

Open Windows Explorer (Windows key + E) Tools --> Folder Options --> View
Then check the box next to "Launch folder windows in a separate process" then reboot.