.:23 Ways to speed up WinXP without defrag:.

[ekÆsine]

i don't agree with 18.) Do not partition the hard drive. i think any computer around 4GB or over should have at least 2 partitions. you can accidentally format a drive as easily as you can delete a drive.

also i do this so i can store user data and a ghost image of the operating system volume on the second partition. this way i can make a bootable CD and put ghost2k3 and autoexec.bat on it. when they pop in that bootable CD it would start a DOS menu asking if they want to restore there OS.

if they select yes it would execute a ghost2k3 commandline switch that would automatically start restoring the OS partition. this is equal to any restore CD and works the same way.

this is something you could do when fixing a computer. i would tell them to store all data to the second partition. all your client needs to know is to boot with the CD when their operating system needs restoring. i suggested ghost2k3 because it supports NTFS.

 

[kboy]

Nice List Placebo!!!

 

[LoTeX]

21.) Disable unnecessary services. Windows XP loads a lot of services that your customer most likely does not need. To determine which services you can disable for your client, visit the Black Viper site for Windows XP configurations.

I just did this recently myself and boy oh boy it really did decrease windows startup time, the "desktop phase" is now way faster.

 

[kboy]

When I originally Disabled some Services I took out My Home Network also so be careful!

 

[Demalii]

I agree with 18, when a hard drive is at 50% capacity it will indeed slow down, especially on a smaller hard drive, if you partition it into 2 say on a 10G hard drive, and fill up your C drive with Winxp, windows office, and a paint program and a little music, you've already filled up 2.5G, now the second hard drive is for games, you install 3 games if you're lucky and you drive will be running twice as slow than if it weren't partitioned... nice list Placebo

 

[Shannon]

I disagree with #18 as well. I think it's much safer to have a seperate partition for the OS. I have to physical drives, and one is partitioned(generously, I might add) for the OS. And with all that can happen, I can reinstall the OS on a clean and reformated drive without touching the rest of my data. I've done it several times, and always been thankful that my drives are partitioned.

who really has a 10 gig hard drive anymore, anyway?

otherwise, nice list!

 

[LoTeX]

who really has a 10 gig hard drive anymore, anyway?

i don't. but i do have a 20 gig one. (which has 2 partitions 50/50)

 

[Eric5000]

Ooh

Nice! Thanks guy for all the tips! Man! I didn't even think my hard drives would be on indexing! But they were- the other tips were great too! Go England!

-Eric

Ps- Who here in America doesn't envy your guy's accents???

 

[TheMajor]

Use seperate partitions for OS/Soft and other data (MP3, movs, docs) Its easy to format this way.

Multiple partitions do not neccesarely decrease performance. You can manually increase the partitions cluster size to increase performance with Partition Magic. (only useful for FAT/FAT32) Be aware of slack space though.

Also:

You can defragment really quick if you move all data from one partition to another and back.

 

[TheMajor]

You can also increase the cluster size using the MSDOS "/z" switch: "format /Z:8" (8KiloByte clusters) for example. Make sure you know what you are doing though. You will loose all data on your harddrive and some programs won't work.