Speed up Windows XP tweak |
The Closet Nerd (nice name) serves up his favorite Windows XP tweak to make things snappier navigating around Windows XP:
It’s probably the simplest tweak I do, but it’s also one of the most effective at speeding up EVERYTHING in Windows.
To enable this XP tweak do the following:
STEP 1. Navigate to START -> My Computer (right mouse click) -> Properties
STEP 2. Choose the ADVANCED tab and then click Performance “Settings”
STEP 3. [Update: first click the “Adjust for best performance” which will uncheck all the boxs and then … ] choose the “Custom” radio button.
STEP 4. Check the following three boxes: smooth edges of screen fonts, use drop shadows for icon labels on desktop, and use visual styles on windows and buttons.
I just tried this out and it makes an immediately noticeable difference with the speed moving around within Windows XP.
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Or you can just leave it at adjust for best performance. I mean it is Windows. Who needs pretty? :p
Comment by darkmoon — July 20, 2006 @ 10:18 am PST
The smoothed out fonts, at least, is an important setting. Jagged fonts don’t look very good.
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 10:29 am PST
you call it looking good. I call it bloat! :p Doesn’t show up on my 2k box anyways. Only XP box I have is my work laptop and on a 14″ screen at 1024×768, I’d really rather have any sort of performance with a measly 512M ram.
Comment by darkmoon — July 20, 2006 @ 10:36 am PST
The smoothed fonts setting doesn’t add much bloat. Monitor your memory with and without that setting. It’s a trivial amount of memory. The other checkboxes though (which are all default checked, BTW) really add up and present noticeable slowdowns.
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 10:44 am PST
I thought you meant “uncheck” to improve performance, but apparently not.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 20, 2006 @ 11:17 am PST
If you click on the “Adjust for best performance” radio button it will uncheck every box and then when you choose “custom” it should start with all boxes unchecked. Then you need to check the three boxes as mentioned in the post above. Or you can just uncheck them all. I probably should add to above this additional instruction, if that’s not very clear.
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 11:28 am PST
It wasn’t clear to my foggy morning brain. One other clarification: there are three “Settings” buttons — click the top one (within the “Performance” group).
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 20, 2006 @ 11:53 am PST
Good point, I added the word “Performance” in front of settings. Closet Nerd has much more detailed screenshots with red around each item, I just wanted to write down the basic steps on the chance that if the Nerd’s blog should go down someday this post still makes sense. That’s happened with some blogs I’ve linked to in the past and then the entry which says “go here” ends up sending people to a 404 page.
Of course next year at this time we’ll be talking Vista tweaks, won’t we?
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 12:04 pm PST
I’ve been testing it since alpha. Not exactly sure what you can tweak on Vista to make it more performance oriented. Out of box installation, without even clicking start, it took up 512M ram. Maybe more, it’s been a while. That’s something scary.
Since I use my machines to crunch data and run cpu intensive, I don’t think I’ll be venturing even close to Vista for the next decade.
Comment by darkmoon — July 20, 2006 @ 12:19 pm PST
darkmoon - that superfetch stuff sounds useful. Plug in a thumbdrive and juice it with extra memory. Is that feature activated (yet) in Vista? I haven’t and won’t be using Vista until it is an official release, but am curious about that feature and a few others. Also curious how it will look/perform on my tablet.
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 12:33 pm PST
not sure. I’ll ask the other guys that did the latest test if they messed with it at all. The last install we did was the open beta. I think it took like 2.5 hours of basic install time. We were at a GLUG meeting when we did it, and started it. Most people left before it even finished.
That REALLY bothers me. I’m not really certain what Superfetch is supposed to accomplish. You gain memory from flash? How is that supposed to give you a powerboost at all? Flash USB is pretty slow for performance sake and you’re still bottlenecked with USB2. I’m also hesitant with the whole “optimized loading” bit that Vista supports. So far what I’ve seen is the similar boot up sequence as XP. You boot up, it looks all pretty and nice, but you can’t actually do anything. The window is drawn, but the background isn’t loaded yet. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Almost like giving you the buns on a burger and telling you to wait for the meat.
If you ask me, it still doesn’t beat my 20 second boot up time for a Pentium III - 1G 512M for linux running fluxbox. Even shutdown, I can shutdown in 3 seconds to pure power shutdown. Windows is totally missing out on true optimized loading.
Comment by darkmoon — July 20, 2006 @ 12:45 pm PST
Those startup & shutdown times are indeed impressive, Darkmoon, but why is that so important? I haven’t shut down my XP Pro PC in nearly a month…
Comment by Rob O'Daniel — July 21, 2006 @ 11:27 am PST
one word. “laptop”. desktop, probably don’t need that.
The question was actually pointed at optimized loading. On bootup, XP doesn’t have a very optimized anything. Vista doesn’t either. I suppose if you look at 24×7 on machines, then they’re okay, but the RAM to sustain all the services is still ridiculous.
Usual default install of XP somewhere around 192M ram. That’s a lot more than I’d want to give, especially if you’re doing virtual windows, running exciting builds that already take half hour or plus because you can’t get away from VS’s bloat. One of the first things I do with any Windows install is rip out all of the services that isn’t needed. Use BlackViper’s service guide to do that.
Am I biased when it comes to development? Absolutely. BSD workstations are probably the most efficient imho.
For gaming though, I couldn’t care less. Windows Onward Ho! :p
Comment by darkmoon — July 21, 2006 @ 12:02 pm PST