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