Windows Tweaks

I love to get as much power out of my XP as I can, so im looking at some certain tweaks. Everything I do pretty much revolves around gaming.

The website im looking at first is http://www.activewin.com/editorials/alex_harris/2.shtml

I'd like to get some information about the following tweaks on the site.

first.. "Get more processing Power" How exactly would this work? would i run the command then start up Battlefield 2 or something?

next "Increase speed by tweaking prefetcher settings"
what exactly is this?

then if you look at the bottom of the page click the next page link. or
http://www.activewin.com/editorials/alex_harris/4.shtml

"Unload DLL's to Free Memory"

Most of the tweaks you find on the net wqill do nothing for performance and is not recommended. I would just stay away from tweaking guides as a whole.

The "Get more processing power" tip does do something, but is actually the exact opposite that you want happening while running something like a game. It physically moves a particular applications files to help with seek times. It looks at which applications have been launched recently to determine what to optimize.

So, that is definitely not something you want happening while running a game. There is also no need to free up processing time from any idle processes. Idle processes take zero CPU time. Low-priority threads will never take any CPU time in the presence of higher-priority runnable threads.

As for Prefetch, this should help:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/default.aspx

"Unload .dll's to Free Memory" will also do nothing to help performance. Has anybody ever noticed how this is under the "explorer" branch of the registry? This is because it has nothing to do with DLLs in general, but only DLLs loaded as plug-ins by Explorer. Also, just like anything else, if the code has not been used for a while it will be paged out.

The only time this may be useful is when developing and debugging something to work as a plug-in for Explorer, not performance.

Also, I know you did not ask about this, but don't even bother with disabling services. An unused service will use no CPU time and its memory will be reclaimed as needed.