XP SP2 Performance Issues

[All Systems Go]

I was talking to someone the other day and he told me that I could speed up Window XP SP2 by disabling a number of prorgams that are running in the background. I've had a look but I can't find any website that will give me a list of programs it would safe to diable. Does anyone know?

[pablissimo]

I'd largely contend that the guy was talking crap. Almost all of the sites that show optimisation tips and tweaks manage a split of 50% 'legend' and 50% 'nonsense'.

You can improve boot times by disabling services that aren't required. However, services that have nothing to do (for example, the Smart Card service) won't consume any CPU resource and will therefore get paged out to disk automagically. The Indexing Service can be disabled, as can System Restore if you don't feel you'll need it though the practical impact of these actions are likely to be minimal. Services aren't the things to be worrying about but any malware and viruses that've sneaked onto your machine. Check Task Manager's process list and see if there's anything obviously suspect there (applications whose name are arbitrary combinations of letters and numbers are often bogus, though don't get confused between them and actual system processes - Google the process name).

Pab's 'Speeding Up XP' List

• Buy more RAM

[Phil^]

any performance increase you get is likely to be negligable unless you have a ton of unnecessary programs which eat ram, or some sort of folding/ seti at home/ etc software you left running in the background and forgot about.
The buying of more ram is the best way to get a boost in performance when you are at < 1gb. Any more then that and benefits start to tail off really unless you have lots of things running that eat memory

[pablissimo]

I currently have open Firefox with four low-image tabs, Word and MSN Messenger. Task Manager's registering around 600 meg of memory committed (bearing in mind that'll also include pages that've been swapped to disk) on a machine with 1gig physical. If I start Azureus, I've just blown another 70meg without even starting a download. More memory => fewer swaps to disk. Disk accesses are around four orders of magnitude slower than memory accesses. That's the equivalent difference of that between 1 second and 3 hours. The assumption of 'buy more RAM' is of course that the amount you have already is inadequate - buying more when you're spare capacity doesn't make sense.

Additionally, you're not taking into account the fact that programmers are now happier eating tonnes of RAM because low-memory-footprint programming is both inefficient economically and largely unnecessary. We as coders have lots of RAM available in general, so we've no qualms using as much as we need. Programs written in .NET (and Java) are, in memory-allocation terms, at the mercy of the garbage collector irrespective of how they're coded.

It'd help to know what applications you tend to run to get a better picture of why your machine is slow, but in general just proper housekeeping will keep things running adequately. Computers don't tend to degrade in performance on their own, but we perceive a difference over time because we're asking them to do more and more things with the same fixed resources they had when we bought them.

Unless you're my step-sister whose insistence on installing every porn dialer and trojan she can get her hands on is the bane of visits home.

[Tietäjä]

Cleaning registry remains, defragmenting hard disks, and such will have a minor impact too. Things like file indexing services are practically useless, and I guess you could tweak off a number of other Windows enviroment services to fine-tune it, but that's neglible. Those would probably mainly affect boot times, anyways.

In addition to the RAM fix suggested, a dual core processor does wonders to smooth things up, in case you're annoyed of the virus scanner firing off in the middle of the porn movie causing a choke. For me it's been making a difference.

If you insist on disabling some background services for shits and giggles, msconfig can plug off useless trash running (for a search on different programs to know which ones to turn off), and for managing background services through run > services.msc (for a list of items).

[AdmV0rl0n]

Originally Posted by pablissimo

I currently have open Firefox with four low-image tabs, Word and MSN Messenger. Task Manager's registering around 600 meg of memory committed (bearing in mind that'll also include pages that've been swapped to disk) on a machine with 1gig physical. If I start Azureus, I've just blown another 70meg without even starting a download. More memory => fewer swaps to disk. Disk accesses are around four orders of magnitude slower than memory accesses. That's the equivalent difference of that between 1 second and 3 hours. The assumption of 'buy more RAM' is of course that the amount you have already is inadequate - buying more when you're spare capacity doesn't make sense.

Additionally, you're not taking into account the fact that programmers are now happier eating tonnes of RAM because low-memory-footprint programming is both inefficient economically and largely unnecessary. We as coders have lots of RAM available in general, so we've no qualms using as much as we need. Programs written in .NET (and Java) are, in memory-allocation terms, at the mercy of the garbage collector irrespective of how they're coded.

It'd help to know what applications you tend to run to get a better picture of why your machine is slow, but in general just proper housekeeping will keep things running adequately. Computers don't tend to degrade in performance on their own, but we perceive a difference over time because we're asking them to do more and more things with the same fixed resources they had when we bought them.

Unless you're my step-sister whose insistence on installing every porn dialer and trojan she can get her hands on is the bane of visits home.

Just some observations. Sadly XP has a crappy CPU sheduler. So even on dual core, you may find things dragging without the task manager really showing you why. But beyond that, Firefox is a mem hog, when its not leaking memory through its very long term bugs. Don't use Azureous, at least if you have limited ram and want a small footprint, use Utorrent.

With things like Yahoo messenger, MSN, Skype and other tools, once you install them, tweak your start up so they don't start up. Have them as a menu item you can start if you want them running. Computers don't tend to degrade over time, BUT the Operating systems can. Windows fills with a great deal of crud, you need to defrag hard disks, and the registry, and clean up temp files, and so on.

There are other horrors out there, like the install drivers before Service packs issues that plague the platform.

Two links for services info (I think you can trim services and get a benefit. Its not earth shattering, but can help.).
Buying more ram helps.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm
http://www.jasonn.com/turning_off_un..._on_windows_xp

Ad

[djbass]

I rather agree with pablissimo on this one. Sure there are certain things that can be tweaked to give a very minor improvement in load times, but you will find XP has been built with optimization in mind. Usually if it slows down its due to poorly written 3rd party programs running in the background (just take a look at your notification tray for a start.. they love hanging out in this area). 99% of the time I've found it to be a combination of adware, IM programs and toolbar 'enchancements' (ie: google, yahoo etc) that eat system resources like crazy.

Still if you want a decent guide on whats safe to touch and whats not BlackViper is pretty canon on the subject.

[Androme]

Stop using Azureus and use uTorrent (build 1.6.1 - don't use any version after this) instead.

Also, try downloading Tweak XP and see if that helps.