Tweaking XP software

hey guys im a gaming person and i want a really good PC in order to do that i need to tweak the XP. I have XP home. Any software ideas? Im willing to pay for it too. depends what it is.

So....what's the question here? What are you trying to do?

im trying to make the games on my PC perform better and better performance for the XP OS.

Simple: Run less stuff. The less processes you run, the more of your memory is free for games, the less CPU cycles are wasted for background processes.
The most important tweaking software are two things: services.msc which comes with Windows, and autoruns which is freely available from sysinternals.

the services.msc is what actually funning on the system right?

You'd probably be better off investing in hardware than software if you are willing to spend some money.

MRD said:

You'd probably be better off investing in hardware than software if you are willing to spend some money.

Click to expand...

I agree, even though I love tweaking windows. Hardware upgrades are more benefiting upgrades then software. Unless it is a security app or OS.

There is soo many good free things out there for "I know not how to tweak Windows through the reg" that is it is boggling.

There is a disticntion between tuning and tweaking. Tuning is what you need to do for eeking out the extra your hardware can give. You tweak to make it work/look like you want.

Having a well tuned machine is the best. It starts in BIOS and ends up to the app you want to run. In the middle you tune the OS. Then you tweak it to meet your tastes.

I still think if you don't want to tinker with the OS and tune it to the edge. Go the brute force route. Hardware upgrades.

Really the only way to make an OS run faster is to turn things off and use as little resources as you can.

If you never used the Services.msc before. You might consider creating a Hardware Profile. That way if you get over zelous, you can boot into a known good profile and not have much issue geting past it.

Once you get past that, you then attack the reg and do some OS surgery. If your crafty, you filddle with the shell and take out crap that you have no need for. Go to love nLite and the others for things like that. Makes it much easier. If you have a basic understanding of the NT platform, you can do it the hard way.

if you feel your hardware is good enough, look for the 'XP Tweak Guide' from www.tweakguides.com. It's a huge pdf that goes through and tells you what things you can do that will make xp run better. The same guys do guides for games as well.

I use the guide, but mainly because it has a list of common services that run under xp, and it tells you what they do and if you can shut them off or not.

Other than that, I don't know off hand any programs that run that do it. I do remember something that runs when you start a game that shuts down the unneeded services and starts them back up when you quit.

as long as i defrag the registry and repair with, scna spyware, defrag the RAM and HDD that should give me better performance right?

There should be no reason to defrag the RAM. Shut the machine down it is cleared. It is volatile storage. Plus Windwos Xp does a good job of managing the memory.

As for defragging the reg. I see hardly any benifit from doing so. If any benfit. Compacting the reg in theory might help in some cases. Though I see no actual benifit doing so.

Now your hard drive that stores files and moves stuff around, yes you will get gains making things in an orderly fashion. It will make anything on that disk faster to get all of it loaded. It won't have to search through the whole drive for bits and pieces of data.

Why the RAM and reg do not really need to be defragged. Sometimes running a reg scrubber like ccleaner can help with programs loading and other tid bits. Since redundant calls to the reg are reduced. Scanning your reg is not needed very often if you do not install or uninstall items often. Many times even if you do, it will not effect the actual OS. Since most calls do not reffer to the redundant keys.


Cleaning the temp files and other OS related folders can help in some cases. Like Prefetch and your cache. It will be a lil bit slower at first. Then as it rebuilds it wil speed bck up. To much slows a system down accessing the folders. That is why ccleaner is a nice application. Just be very careful using it. It can take out more then you expect.

yea when i do defrag the regisrty and defrag the RAM it gets so slow at first. It took 10mins for the start bar to apear and lots of not responding so i went and to get some stuff at the store and came back which was an hour and it stillo said not responding so i did a restart 4 times and it runs perfectly.

I never bit into the marketing of defragging the RAM. It is not perminate storage. Random access memory. Shut the machine down, it is clean and ready for new data. there is nothing long term to fragment. It moves stuff in and out the time you use it. RAM is very dynamic.

There is no reason I can think of RAM needs to be defragged. Same as the registry. The hive is not like your operating system in how it works. Makers of them type of applications add features that really don't do anything for a computer. They sure make it sound like it does though. In reality, it is just soemthign to add to a product to call it a higher version and make it seem newer and shinier.

This is one reason I do not use the 'Tweak your machine software'. Alot of it is fluff and don't do crap. There is some things that really do benfit and make it worth it. Most of it is fluff though.

some what i do believe that defagging the scanning the registy is important because i had some problems with some drivers which randomly shutdown my PC when i was in a game and i scanned and fixed a total amount of 365 errors which made it so my PC didnt restart. m I do agree with you with defragging the RAM. It is useless.

If you want a good solution to clean your machine out. CCleaner (CrapCleaner) is about the best. It is free and does things that actually clean the machine out.

Learning how the hives work will give you a greater undersatnading of what the Windows OS really is. If you use programs and see a certain type of key, you know if you need it or not.

I suggest give this a glance over. Yes it is very geeky. You then will understand why most the apps out there making claims are actually rubbish.
http://www.microsoft.com/products/i...2b9a8cb3-9817-39e8-cfbc-80b3db19d37b&type=ovr

i currently used Registry mechanic. Is that an ok program?

I use that also. It is ok, but it was naughty once. it recomended me remove an imporatn custom control I just setup. It is ok, but the CCleaner is actually a better value. Though most the cleaners are about the same. The RM has a nice restore feature though. It is a pretty fast scan engine.

Sometimes it does get happy and try and take items I would rather it not.

Something I did on my machine was enable "Hard Drive Optimization during Idle" which I am thinking does defrag and prioritizes more often access files while the screen saver is running. The other thing I did a long time ago was had xp flush the page file every time it shut down. I got rid of that because on a 2gb pagefile, it could take 10-15 to shutdown.

Also, be careful with registry cleaners, and trust the ones that people recommend. I used one once that wiped out my device manager, and killed the plug n play service. It took some registry restoring to fix it. So, back up your registry before you do anything to it.

I personally would forget about tweaking software. If you don't understand it, you shouldn't be messing with it.

Good to see you posting Drew. Long time, no read.