My XP performance tweaking guide is what has brought MOST of you to this site before at some point in the past. I personally get sick of going through and doing so many tweaks by hand for every installation of windows. Today I'd like to put a spotlight on what has quickly become my favorite no nonsense, no BS and best of all COMPLETELY FREE tweaking application.

What is it you ask? DriverHeaven's TuneXP...

I believe firmly that I have written and continue to update the best XP performance tweaking guide available. Alot of people have tweaking guides, but most of their tweaks have nothing at all to do with performance! I have been posting alot of various customization tweaks in seperate articles on this site. I will be compiling them someday in the future to create the ultimate XP Customization guide, but I feel I have alot more to do before I can make a claim like that.

Alright, enough of that talk already, lets dive into what this program looks like and does!

It's a very simple layout with all of the tweaking categories on the top. Here's a couple of screenshots for you.

Memory and File System

Accelerate DLL Unloading
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurr entVersionExplorerAlwaysUnloadDLL]
"(Default)"="1"

Anytime a process is ended this will force windows to try and unload any DLL files associated with the now closed application. This can and probably will have a negative affect on performance if you reopen applications not too long after closing them. If you have buttloads of RAM, don't do this one! It Free's up used RAM that most of us really do want.

Clearing PageFile on Shutdown
This one actually HURTS performance since it slows down your shutdown process since it has to delete your entire pagefile which in my case is over 1Gb! They say that it speeds your boot time up, which it may...

Disable Paging Executive
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.

The best source of information I have found on this can be found here.

Faster Shutdown
Wait to kills both apps and services both have been lowered to 2 1000. This one really will help you shutdown noticeably faster most of the time.

FIle Allocation Size
ConfigFileAllocSize was set to 512
This one proves that the writer of this application reads my guides Unfortunately he included a tweak I had misspelled the f was supposed to be a t.... It is Contiguous File allocation size Unfortunately a user by the name of axmax proved me wrong on this tweak. It's ONLY a win9x tweak MS doc for 9x. I cannot find anything about this for NT bases OS's nor is there a default value for this key. I'm VERY sorry about this one everybody, it's my fault that a bad tweak was included in this app.

Optimize Prefetch
This changes the EnablePrefetcher key to a value of 3 which caches both boot process and applications. On systems with low amounts of RAM you will NOT want to use this tweak.

Increase NTFS Performance
NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate is a very nice tweak to do. They could have included NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation but I believe they decided to leave this one out since it has caused some issues with some software.

IO Page Lock Limit
this sets the IoPageLockLimit key
Specifies the maximum number of bytes that can be locked for I/O operations. According to this document the settings are slightly off by this application. 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.

Clear Prefetch Folder
This opens a little DOS box that deletes all the contents of windows/prefetch. There's been a bit of debate on the affects of doing this, but I personally clear it from time to time which means that I agree with the usage of this tweak.

Defrag Boot Files
This uses defrag.exe -b

Disable Zip
Unregisters zipfldr.dll which stops the windows built in zip program.

Ultra Fast Booting
This setting is what truly makes this program worth downloading! I haven't quite figured out exactly what it does yet, but even on my already tweaked out systems it improved my boot speed! I know it does something additional with defrag.exe that I haven't found any documentation on yet and it does a bit more than just defragmenting. I honestly don't know yet.... Hopefully I can learn more about this as I continue to investigate.
Hardware

Enable UDMA 66
This uses the EnableUDMA66 key which has seen some debate about the validity in Windows XP.

Increase CPU Priority
This uses the Win32PrioritySeparation key. More details can be found from MS here. The default value of this is 2 and this programs sets it to 38. This greatly increases the priority level of foreground applications.

Increase USB Polling Interval
This sets the IdleEnable key to 1 where the default is 0. Basically changes the USB polling interval from 1ms to 5ms which can reduce CPU load. This is primarily a tweak for laptops which can save battery life and fixes a problem with some laptops entering the C3 processor power-saving state.

Speed up windows IRQ handling
IRQ8Priority This "tweak" I believe is a myth since I cannot find anything about it that provides solid evidence that it works. What it does is sets IRQ 8 to have a real time priority AKA top priority. hundreds of people have used this tweak and claim that it magically gave them tons better performance, but I'm not convinced! Show me something from a source with anywhere near the credibility of MS and I'll have my mind changed about this one. Anyone? Bueller?

Internet

IP Settings
this is just a few ipconfig related items.

DNS cache increase
This one changes 4 different keys:
CacheHashTableBucketSize
CacheHashTableSize
MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit
MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit
f you do a TON of surfing like I do then it might help you a little to increase how much cache is allocated to DNS information. DNS looks up what IP number relates to each domain. By increasing the size of this cache it can cut down on the number of DNS queries. Minor I know, but every little bit helps.

Services

You can quickly set Fast User switch, Messenger and Themes services to Automatic, disabled or even manual! These 3 services are very commonly changed from their default values. I'd like to see some additional services added to this list in future.

Miscellaneous

This menu gives you quick access to a number of frequently used applications. Check disk, Defragment, system file checker and windows update.

Conclusion
Since this is something that is completely free and is being built by one of my favorite sites I hope they can take what criticism there was in this article. There's quite a few very handy things this program does to help speed the tweaking process up. It is certainly worth the download even if the ultra fast booting is the only part of the program you use. I believe that this is going to be a program to keep an eye on since it has so much potential.

In the coming weeks I will be taking in depth looks at more of the top tweaking applications available. This is primarily due to me wanting to expand upon my XP tweaking articles. When I find applications doing handy things I will do my best to show you how they do it. Especially the pay programs