Windows XP optimization - spicing things up a bit
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Windows XP optimization - spicing things up a bit.
A lot of Unix OS users tend to think that a lot is missing in Windows. It has been installed on your computer just like on thousands of others, and there is little personal in it. They like to see Unix and Linux systems as dishes you cook for yourself the way you want them, and Windows – as prepacked lunches that don’t leave you a lot of variety.
But Nix systems are still rare and not widespread among common users, so we are left with the prepacked lunches. In this case what is left for you is just spice the food up, of course if the spices are provided. And a company such as Microsoft can surely provide some basic salt-and-pepper for their products.
This article will be exactly about this – where to look for spices in your Windows and how to add them to the whole picture.
Getting Rid of what you don’t need
As you may know, Windows includes a huge variety of drivers . This is very convenient, as when a new device is connected all the drives can load automatically for it. But not all users get new hardware everyday, so if you want to free up some space and think that extra drivers is something you don’t need, just delete the Driver Cache folder in your Windows folder. A side effect may cause your system to ask for drivers when you do make an upgrade.
If you turn off System Restore service, you can guess what this can lead to. If the system for any reason crashes, you wont be able to restore to the previously saved point as there wouldn’t be one. But this can help you if you are desperate for free space. So if you are sure you can keep your PC from crashing, go to Control Panel – System properties – System Restore and select Disable System Restore service.
For even more space, you can clear the folder Windows uses to store cashed system files – Window\System32\dllcache. You should know thought that this folder is hidden, and you will have to enable hidden files and folders viewing before you can erase it. Just erasing files from this folder will not do any good, as its size is specified in the system registry. You can go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
And find the SFCQuota parameter. Set it to any small size(cant be zero) and save changes. Now you can go to dllcache folder and clear out its contents.
Windows XP in its work uses a Hibernate mode, or Sleep Mode. How this works is that Windows saves a “print” of RAM on your hard drive and goes to sleep, and then copies it back into RAM as if it was there working all the time. This print is saved in the special hiberfill.sys file, and its size will be equal to the size of RAM. This file will be created every time your PC starts, no matter if you are going to use Hibernate or not.
AS most computers are purchased to work and not sleep, it is possible to get rid if this file. Of course simply deleting it wont give any results, as it will created again. To get rid of it completely, go to Control Panel - Power Management – Sleep Mode – and uncheck the “Allow Sleep Mode usage”.
Now let’s take a look at the page file. It is used to virtually increase the size of RAM using a part of HDD space, and therefore can be helpful on PC’s with low RAM sizes. By default, the page, or swap file size is set to 1.5 Ram size. As amounts of RAM on modern PC can exceed a couple of gigabytes, the page file grows ridiculously large. To manually set the size of the page file, go to Control Panel – System – Advanced , click the Parameters button and go to Performance. Here once again in Advanced you can set the size of the page file. Unfortunately no definite number can be given here, if you would like to experiment try going anywhere from .25 to 2 sizes of your ram.
Some more free space can be acquired by deleting some Windows-programs that you don’t need or use. For example lets take WordPad. If you have Microsoft Office, you almost never use WordPad. So why keep it on your hard drive? The only problem is that you wont be able to remove it by simply going to Control panel, Add or Remove Programs. And it is not because it is an essential part of Windows, just Microsoft decided to hide uninstall options for some components so that users use their products more.
To get to see these programs in the add or remove, you have to edit the sysoc.inf file, which can be located Windows\inf. From every line in this file you have to remove the word HIDE, and !only! the word HIDE. You have to leave everything the same, even punctuation marks. For example the line for WordPad in the beginning looked like this :
MSWordPad=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,wordpad.inf,HIDE,7.
And should look like this after editing:
MSWordPad=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,wordpad.inf,,7.
When you finish editing this file, the list of programs in add or remove will greatly expand to include all Windows standard programs.
Taking the safe approach.
Before you start setting up the security of your system, you have to decide for yourself whether you trust the default Windows security software and if you are going to use it. It is the developer who knows best the vulnerable parts of his software, and theoretically the developer himself makes the best cover ups for such weak spots. From all this it can be pretty clear that regularly installing all Windows hotfixes and updates can save you a load of trouble.
Right after hotfixes you have to think about filesharing. When we say think, we mean turn it off. A computer with anything shared on the net will never be as safe and secure as the one with sharing turned off. Setup and use an FTP protocol if you absolutely must constantly share files.
First you have to check the properties of every logical partition and see if their sharing is turned off. But to think that this ensures your safety is wrong, since there is always a Shared Documents folder by default set up by Windows itself. It is a special folder designed so that any files put into it are immediately shared on the net. To disable this folder the following key has to be removed from the system registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ MyComputer\ NameSpace\ DelegateFolders\ {59031a47-3f72-44a7-89c5-5595fe6b30ee}.
Since we are getting rid of shares to ensure your security, we no longer need the thing that makes these shares work. Lets now go to Control Panel – Network Connections and look up the properties of the current active connection. Next in the TCP\IP protocol properties we go to Advanced and choose the Disable NetBios through TCP\IP option. Microsoft File and Printer sharing is also not needed anymore, so uncheck this value as well.
Next we have a more important task of disabling some unnecessary services. We have a lot of choices here, since the amount of services that start with Windows is huge. Just enough to ensure that the system cant stat and function in almost any configuration and process any tasks. Which in fact means that it is not personalized for anyone at all, definitely not for you. So we have a choice here – either to leave it be or make so it fits our own needs and not the needs of “any potential user”. To get to the place where we can configure the services go to Control Panel – Administrative – Services, and see for yourself the huge list of small things that are running right now on your computer, almost never used.
Not all the extra services are dangerous but it is worth looking through most of them. Especially since every extra service slows down your PC’s performance. One of the first to look at is the “Terminal Service” which is the basic of remote desktop control. If you never use this service to control your desktop from outside, turn it off.
“Messaging service” is quite often mistakenly recognized by users as the Windows Messenger program, even though it most definitely isn’t. This service is required to exchange messages with the administrator or system announcements . Since in most home networks this service is never used, you can feel free to disable it as well.
The NetMeetingRemote Desktop Sharing opens up the access to your desktop through the NetMeeting program. In most cases, users have no idea what it is and have never used it, so feel free to remove it. If you decided not to run updates on your machine, then disable the Automatic Updates service as well.
It is best to leave the DHCP-client service enables, as some ISP’s use it. Task Scheduler is a good thing if you know a lot about it and use it regularly. IF you don’t – feel free to disable it as well.
The Help and Support service is entirely up to you. If you use Windows help and support center then leave it off, otherwise disable it.
Windows XP has its own firewall for security purposes. The idea of using a firewall is very good, but it is up to you to decide whether to use the one you get with your Windows or get something else. If you went for choice two, then disable the Internet Firewall service.
In such manner go through all the ervices, read their description and decide if you need them or not. For example if you don’t own a printer, you can disable all the services tht have to do with it, etc.
Getting some more performance out of our system
We have actually done quite a lot to do so when we disabled all the unnecessary services. This method is so productive, that some people choose to not do anything else and feel like the increase in performance from that alone is good enough for them.
The main problem about increasing a PC’s performance is the fact that it is very hard to measure it as it is. Free disk space or system security are things that can be easily checked, performance isn’t. In most cases there are only two possible values for performance – acceptable or not. Everything else is hard to evaluate. If you favorite game takes 4 seconds less to load it can hardly be forth the hours you spend optimizing your PC for it.
Nonetheless, there is still one operation that come in handy to most users. As you should know, programs and applications require RAM to operate. If the system wouldn’t be able to clear parts of no longer used programs from RAM, it won’t be able to function longer then a couple of minutes. But the Windows system uses a weird democratic approach and sometimes when clearing RAM, removes not only the program, but the system modules that have been run with it. This sometimes makes little sense, as even if the program will not be run any more, those modules will be needed again in a minute or two, and will have to be loaded into RAM again, which takes time.
That is why if your system has sufficient amounts of RAM, it is possible to allocate some space and fiate it for the system Core. To do so, lets go to the system registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
And set this value to 1 and restart the PC.
If as you hover your cursor over the All programs menu in your Start menu, it takes a long time for the whole list of programs to appear, there is something you can do about it. This list could easily be displayed almost instantly, but for some reason there is by default a small delay implemented into the system. To fix this, go to the registry, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Control Panel\ Desktop and replace the parameter MenuShowDleay value, which should be 400 by default. It is best to set it anywhere from 50 to 100, as if you set it close to 0 even as you accidentally move the cursor over All programs, the menu will open immediately.
Finally, there is something that can be done with the way the system looks – the visual effects. It is of great importance to some, but completely insignificant to others. So go to Control Panel – System –Advanced – Performance settings, and go to the Visual effects tab, where you can check or uncheck whichever options you desire.
A lot of users use their PC’s to match movies, shows and other multimedia. This is extremely popular and supported by most systems. There is only one bad thing about multimedia files – they are usually very big in size, and when they are written onto your hard drive these big files get fragmented since they have to be divided into pieces, which in turn will result in greater read times when playing them back. To make the system write big files into spaces most appropriate for them on the hard drive, we have to change the value of the ContigFileAllocSize parameter in system registry, found at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem , which sets the maximum size of unfragmented sectors on the hard drive.
The system loading file.
In the root folder of your system disk there is a text file called boot.ini, which is used as your Windows XP boots up. This file does not only define which selections you will see in the operating system selection menu, but also controls the sole process of booting up, and sets certain parameters. In the most basic way this is what the contents of this file look like:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\
WINDOWS
[operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\
WINDOWS= "Windows XP" /fastdetect.
In the [boot loader] the parameters of the loader itself are defined. The timeout field identifies the delay in seconds, which the loader takes to give you a choice for action. If you set it to zero the selection screen will not appear o your screen at all.
The default parameter sets the path to the system loaded by default. In the [operating systems] section all the systems that can be loaded are described. multi(0) is the name of the physical adapter(starting with 0 and going up). The disk(0) will almost always equal zero, then the disk number is set by the parameter rdisk(N), and the partition by partition(N). Note that disk numbers start from 0, but partition numbering starts from 1. In the columns the name of the system should be provided, which can be followed by a key.
Every system can be loaded with the following keys:
/basevideo uses only the standard VGA video driver;
/fastdetect sets the system not to detect Plug’n’Play devices while loading;
/maxmem sets the maximum amount of RAM the system may use;
/noguiboot disables the loading logo;
/noserialmice=[com 1,2,3] tells the system not to detect the mouse on the corresponding COM port;
/bootlog tells the system to create a log file while booting - \Nbtlog.txt;
/safeboot makes the system load in Safe mode;
/sos prints out the list of all the used drivers.
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