and check the
Transfer Mode scroll
boxes. Set them all to
DMA If Available, then click OK. Continue
to do this for each IDE Controller, and you should be right.
The
XP Prefetcher
With Windows XP comes a service called the Prefetcher.
This service monitors which programs initialize when Windows boots,
then in future, fetches them quickly. The Prefetcher is enabled
by default, but you can improve its performance. Simply navigate
to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory
ManagementPrefetchParameters
in the registry and find the value
EnablePrefetcher. Most
likely, it will be set to 3. The recommended setting for the
prefetcher is 5, and that's what works best for me. Feel free to
play around with it a bit, though, and find out what works best
for you.
It is possible to disable the Prefetcher by setting
the value to
0, but the only reasons you might want to do
this is if you wanted to test a machine in a lab environment.
ZIP
Folders
A really quick tweak... Windows XP has built-in support for .ZIP
files, so that you can view them as normal folders. However, the
system uses a sizeable portion of resources doing this, so disabling
this feature can increase performance. It's easy to do, you just
have to un-register the zipfldr.dll, by going to
Start ->
Run... and typing
regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll
then pressing Enter.
Unloading DLLs
Explorer often caches DLL files in memory for a period of time after
they have finished being used. This can result in large amounts
of memory being taken up by DLL files that are not even being used.
To stop this happening, navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer
Now, you have to create a
new sub-key called
AlwaysUnloadDLL
with a default value of
1.
If you want to disable this tweak, just delete the key. Note: Windows
has to restart for this tweak to take effect.
Hibernation
Another really quick and easy tweak - if you're not going to be
using Hibernation (as most people don't), make sure it is disabled,
as Windows reserves an amount of Hard Drive space equal to that
of your RAM for hibernation. To disable Hibernation, go to
Control
Panel ->
Power Options ->
Hibernate Tab.
Note: Questions ? Ask them in the FORUM 
