Searching for Performance tweaks

[Stolid]

Hey everyone, I'm looking for some performance tweaks to get the extra 'umf' out of my system once it's clocked out. I'm talking about Windows-based OSes for general and 'process heavy' (compiling, games, 3d rendering) type optimizations.

I'll throw a few in, but I know there are more than I'm missing:
1) Drivers, duh, make sure your drivers are the newest and installed correctly
2) Set your Swap (Virtual Memory) to a set size - mine is 256 MB
3) Set your 'role' in the File System of your 'System' area to 'Network Server'
4) Defragment

Thanks in advance, I'm hoping to get these into a file so I have a 'run down' on what to do every time I setup a system for a friend to make sure it's running the best it can for it's speed.

Stolid

[Ridenow]

There are several tweaks for memory, such as setting it to CAS2 in BIOS. I know a few, but honestly do not know them well enough to properly explain them and I do not know DDR. You might throw a post in the memory area asking about them.

[Arkaine23]

Swap file set size is a good one... also you can make a separate partition and drag n drop the set-size swap file into it. With Norton Utilities (even demo version) you can then optimize the swap file's partition...i.e. move it to the leading edge of your Hard drive. This gives the fastest virtual memory performance, and also lets you defrag your swap file very quickly. Or if you have RAID, you can put the swap file as the 1st partition on your 2nd HDD.

Memory settings can be changed in bios. Cas2 is fastest, also bank interleave at 4 improves performance. You can mess with these settings and then benchmark with Sandra to get the best scores. Then burn in with the Sandra memory benchmark 20-30 time consecutively to confirm stability and data integrity.

[FunkyTechnician]

I got a tip from tweakxp that if you are using either XP version and at least 512MB of memory then you can get rid of your swap file alltogether. I decided to give it a try and it's working fine for me.

A²

[jgaud]

How bout some windows registry tweaks too!ALL WIDOWS TRICKS (http://members.aol.com/axcel216/newtip.htm#HOME)

[Stolid]

eh?
Just a question, how is this 'general hardware' - quite a few tweaks are software (such as setting swap file size)
...Just wondering why the post was moved. Thanks for the tweak site.
As for CAS latency, I'd sure hope that everyone knew to set their CAS as low as was stable. I'm talking about non-OC (IIRC: Setting Cas3 to Cas2 is considered OCing) stuff that users would want to do after 'defaulting' everything to hardware (admitadly, some Cas2 chips like to auto to Cas3 - but I went ahead and 'hard BIOSed' mine)
I know there have to be more tricks than this. So here are two more I've dug up
AnalogX's MaxMem and CacheBooster are nice little programs that clear memory/put unneeded memory in SWAP and set your harddrive's cache settings for certain performance types respectively. I always liked AX's stuff, so I give them a thumbs up.

Any more?
Stolid