I believe that after 3 months I now have XP Pro SP1 running to my
satisfaction. But I'm not sure, there may be settings and tweaks I've
missed. I would welcome any further suggestions where performance might be
improved.
System is Celeron2000, 256Mb RAM, Gigabyte mobo, 40Gb HD in 4x10Gb partitions.
What I've done:
1. Installed Windows on C partition, all other software on E partition, all
data files on F partition, and kept G partition for messy stuff such as
editing and temp things.
2. Disabled all but essential Services.
3. In Tools/Performance, set to maximum performance.
4. Disabled all animations, helpers, eye candy, etc.
5. Set System Restore in C and E drives to 5% of disk space (is that
sufficient?), disabled for drives containing only data.
6. Set Pagefile to max and min 500Mb on same partition as Windows. I tried
moving it to its own separate partition--but that didn't seem to make any
difference.
7. Culled startups to bare essentials.
8. Have a modified autoexec.bat running at bootup to empty caches, all temp
folders, and other crud.
What I haven't done (naughty naughty) is downloaded any XP patches and
updates, other than the recent Blaster security patch. My reason for this
is that I'm on dialup, and the thought of playing catchup and wading
through all the patches, trying to see which are "critical", which ones I
need and which I don't, etc, is daunting to say the least, and probably
impractical to download on a 56K modem. The system seems fine without them,
so I'll pass on patching until maybe SP2 comes along. Unless anyone can
think of a specific patch of downloadable size (no more than 10 Mb) that I
absolutely should have (other than the Blaster patch)?
I have Zone Alarm, AVG, and SpywareGuard running only when on internet, and
I update and run both AdAware and Spybot regularly or after visiting
suspect sites such as "free" screensavers.
I think I'm reasonably cautious browsing, haven't seen a virus for years,
and receive virtually no spam, thanks to my excellent ISP's spam and virus
filters and Eudora's very efficient filters. MyIE2 browser keeps out
practically all popups and anything they might contain. So security is not
a major concern. I backup important stuff regularly, so if the worst came
to the worst, reformatting would not be a major problem.
Perhaps I should add that I'm not greatly into gaming. Video and sound are
mobo built-ins. I've considered adding another 256Mb RAM, but don't see any
need for it for what I do.
I might add that, so far, I'm very pleased with XP, after a nervous start.
Any suggestions, anyone?
Don Penlington
From the beach at Surfers Paradise.
http://www.geocities.com/donaldpen/
for sunny Queensland photos, fractal art, free computer tutorials, and more.
The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
with the OpenOffice CD... at a great price!!!
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