T30 Full System Recovery, any suggestions on XP tweaks?

[helmet4000]

I bit the bullet and purchased the 3 recovery CDs with Win XP for my T30. This is because I wanted to do a fresh clean install of the OS and I used kill disk and inadvertently wiped out the partition with the recovery. IBM sells the CDs for $51 including tax and shipping. They got them here in 2 days which was good.

So I did the re-installation:

The CDs did not have SP2 so the windows updates were very time-consuming.
I also added Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition and Spyware Blaster. Plus Office 2003.

The one tweak I did was to go to My Computer-->right click "Properties"--> Advanced "Performance Settings" ----> and then "Adjust for Best Performance". It makes XP look less pretty, but I do not care it moves a bit quicker.

Does anyone have any suggestions for tweaking XP for speed?

I have used some of the Tweakhound.com guides in the past, but I am not sure if some of those tweaks lead to system instability, etc.

-Tom

[danage]

if you want performance, get rid of the antivirus and the spyware tools. they take a lot of speed away. in my opinion, if you're not into warez and porn, the use of such applications is limited anyways.

i used free online scanners when i still had windows and found "trojans" only once or twice.

[Musti]

Depending on your setup and needs, you might want to disable some auto-starting services. I don't suggest you do that if you're uncomfortable doing it, as most of these are highly inter-dependant. If you will do it nevertheless, go with a guide, and tweak very few services at a time, reboot, use the TP, then tweak some more seeing nothing you use is borked. There's one such page among many, for you:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

(A guy called BlackViper published the first ever services tweak pages back in the day, but his pages are archived and not updated for a long time)


You might want to optimize your virtual memory settings
from the same guy: http://www.theeldergeek.com/sizing_the_page_file.htm

You might want to install only the apps you think you will use.


You might want to do regular house-cleaning, like deleting temp files, defragging your system once a month or every two months, depending on your usage.


Symantec is notoriously bloated and resource-hungry. I'd uninstall it and go with a better, leaner product. For most of us, Grisoft's AVG Free edition does the job. Or online virus check regularly.


If you're comfortable using third party tweakers, there's one piece of software I install the moment I'm done with a fresh installation: CachemanXP.


This can go on for pages...but from the top of my head, the above should be enough for an appetizer

Tweaking for performance is fun. Enjoy.

[danage]

Tweaking for performance is fun. Enjoy.

Yet, if I might add, usually doesnt bring much gain in terms of speed.

[WarMachine]

Hi,

Your advices are strange, danage.

How can you say not to use AV or protection programs, and how can you say that tweaking is useless ?

Viruses or Malwares are not exclusively found on warez and pron sites. Have a look at SmileyCentral, for example, and you'll have a spyware. If you're not protected, you should even be infected by surfing on imageshack (WinAntivirusPro)...

Helmet, don't listen to him, you *** must *** install an AV and malwares protection softwares. Yes, NAV takes a lot of resources, but there are light AV, like NOD32, for example.

You can tweak your system a lot with TuneUp Utilities, for example, and use CCleaner or SuperCleaner to keep it clean.

Shutting down unneeded services will speed up the system (danage, install XP on a PII 300 with 128 MB of RAM, and you will see that deactivate services is useful), and bring you a more secure laptop.

Two examples :

- The Themes service takes 4 MB of RAM,
- The Help & Support service is quasi never used, with Broadband Connections, Telephony service is unneeded. Why keep them enabled ?

My PCs, when running, have a maximum of 20 or 21 processes, and are really faster than when there is no optimization. I've done that on dozens of machines, successfully everytime.

W.

[helmet4000]

I have Symantec Corporate Antivirus. I do not think it is as much a resource hog as the consumer versions or suites. I do not think I would plug my computer into an internet connection for a minute if I didn't have some kind of AV software.

The advice on altering services seems pretty good and that is what the author of the tweakhound site suggested. Will take a look at CachemanXP.

thanks for the info. greatly appreciate

[Fusion]

Keeping a system clean is very important.
This isn't really a necessity for you at the moment (since your system is pretty much clean after a new install), but I use CleanUp! on all my PCs and Ntbs about twice a month. Gets rid of all the ugly stuff especially temp files, internet temp files etc. Be carefull though, as it deletes cookies so let's say if you have this forum marked "log in automatically" it will not be so after the CleanUp (iow write down your logins and passwords if you need to).
The PC I'm on now is pretty much what I call a miracle system (PIII 450Mhz, 384MB RAM, 2x 10G HDDs, 16MB ATI Gcard) on which I have XP SP2 and run programs like Dreamweaver 8, Photoshop CS, Nero 7 etc. I usually work with PS and DW at the same time + ICQ, IE and others and there's pretty much minimal lag. I have no reason to upgrade to a new PC at the moment.
I've had this PC since 1999 I think

Dowload: http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/

[Fusion]

Btw: concerning the anti-virus:
I used to have Symantec products also but they really were major system hogs. Especially once you get all the progs you need for work installed etc. you can really feel that Symantec is using too much resources.
Personally, I would recommend NOD32 antivirus. The prog window (when opened) is about 200*400px, no unnecessary button pictures and "nice graphical layout" like Symantec, but it really gets the job done. I have Nod32 in the system tray, but it has pretty much no effect on anything else (performance-wise). Every once in a while it updates itself and then goes back to quietly watching your system.

[WarMachine]

Yeah !

If NOD32 is set to "Automatic", you can even forget it.

Sometimes, I think : "What's happenning with NOD32 Updates ?"

I have a look on the icon, and I see I have the latest definitions.

It's totally transparent, and takes 20 MB or so, no more !

I didn't know Cleaner !

I'll try it as soon as possible.

Have a look at SuperCleaner, it's very nice too !

W.

[ashleys]

It is only worth going to trouble of shutting down so called unneeded services if they're actually "DOING* anything.

Take a look in Task Manager at the processes tab. Pay careful attention to the figures in the CPU column. Almost without exception they're all zero, in other words, they're *NOT* consuming *ANY* cpu time on a regular basis.
People also seem to get very agitated about these idle tasks using up memory. I suggest they familiarise themselves with the concepts of paging, swapping, working sets and working set management (including trimming) before stating categorically that having them using up RAM is a problem.

Almost all the storage management controls in Windows are via internal variables and cannot be tuned directly by the user. The only obvious external controls are in the following registry key,

My Computer\
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
System\
ControlSet001\
Control\
Session Manager\
Memory Management

The two parameters that can usefully be changed but depending on your configuration may have little or no effect are,

LargeSystemCache and DisablePagingExecutive.
The LargeSystemCache alters the calculations made by Windows on how to apportion RAM between programs and the system cache address space(s). The system cache address space(s) are used by the file system to map data. This tweak was traditionally used in NT4 (where I first used it) to give more RAM to file system caching in a server environment. For a desktop setup this is almost never altered.
By setting the DisablePagingExecutive to 1 you can stop the Windows pageable routines and drivers being paged out to disk. This tweak is a double edged sword, on a system with enough RAM thoese routines will not get paged out anyway, on a system short on RAM you just penalise other tasks.

[richp]

Been building high end audio and video workstations and servers both windows and Unix, intel and AMD as well as sparc professionally for years. As far as not running a/v software, thats insane. I demo it to customers all the time with a PC running win2k, image the HD, put it out on the raw internet which is on the outside of my Cisco pix on an 8 port switch and let it sit there for an hour or two, no surfing or anything. Then pull the drive and pop it into one of my other boxes [it's in a carrier] and scan it with AVG pro or in to one of the unix boxes and run clamav on the unmounted disc. It generally picks up at least 20 hits, sometimes more, depends on whether the kids are in school or not.
I have the same feelings on NOT running a hardware firewall on your broadband connection.
As far as A/V 'brands' CA and McAfee cause more problems than they are worth, never fails on service calls, remove them and the system starts running normally. I've had the best results with AVG, they seem to be the most honest and don't try to cram alot of 'make you feel good about spending the money' pop ups saying 'we did this to stop this or that infection that might have been possible if you had continued' geeze, give me a break. Norton seems to run in batches, their 'internet security' package also has issues but their A/V generally is well behaved provide you reboot your system every 2-3 days and get all that memory back it seems to hold on to.
XP, AVG and windows firewall coupled with Firefox is a pretty good combination for most users. Just my take on it...

[richp]

One other thing you might want to do with the IBM recovery discs is to create a XP disc but 'slipstream' the service pack into it and create a XP SP2 disc. I did that initially for for my production runs before sysprepping them and storing the images on my ghost server.