So you finally put that “dream machine” together, eh? You got the dual core processor you wanted with the three gigs of RAM and the dual SLI video cards, so what’s next? Well, it's time to load your operating system.
Now Windows XP Professional has completely loaded and all your drivers are in and running smoothly. It's time to start using all that horse power. Wait a minute. Simple tasks aren't going any faster than on your three-year-old machine! Everything should be running faster, but it's not delivering enough speed to justify all the time and expense you've just put into building this monstrously fast super computer.

Well, just like a car your PC needs to have its performance fine-tuned in order to be a championship-winning contender instead of just a trailer queen. In order to keep your performance scores high you also need regular maintenance to keep everything humming smoothly.

Windows, in what I refer to as its "stock" position, is a great operating system with plenty of bells and whistles. But if what you want is performance and lots of it, the cup holder and seat warmers your stock car came with are nothing but extra ballast holding you back from taking the pole position. In order to get some record performance out of your new, or existing, PC try some of the following tweaks and adjustments and see how well you do.

There are a number of programs out there with which to tune Windows, and we're going to go through a small number of them to identify some of the best to use for both performance and regular maintenance. Some of the maintenance programs will include long time favorites such as Spybot: Search and Destroy, Lavasoft's Adaware, and CCleaner. We'll also be looking at several tuning programs for Windows such as Erunt, RegCleaner, Driver Heaven's TuneXP and Microsoft's own BootVis program as well as several manual tweaks.


Before using any program to do your down and dirty work for you, you should do everything you can by hand first. There are a number of things that you can do in Windows to improve your performance, including changing system services and programs that start up when your operating system loads and back-end adjustments to Windows that provide blanket changes.

Three simple tweaks occur in one place and this is the most common method of adjusting your computer system's performance: the Microsoft System Configuration Utility or simply "MSCONFIG." This particular utility is designed to troubleshoot problems with third party programs in Windows but can also be used to improve the overall performance of your system. <Start -> Run -> MSCONFIG>

There are two tabs that we are going to focus on: the "Startup" and "Services" tabs. Now, we're not going to adjust or change any Windows behaviors in here as much as we're going to make changes to the way it interacts with third party applications. The first place we're going to start is on the "Startup" tab.

In this tab you will see a whole list of checked off items that are starting up when Windows does. Usually the number of programs listed here correlates with the amount of time Windows spends on its splash screen. Additionally, a large number of these programs leave icons down next to the time in the system tray. Also, an immediate indicator of viral or malicious infections can be found here with nonsensical listings of random characters and numbers or with blank entries. Be on the lookout for these. But how do you figure out what can stay and what can go?

A number of the programs listed there are quite easy to identify either by the name or by sliding over to its Location and reading its address. However, some are not as easily identified. There are a number of sites out there that strive to maintain an exhaustive list of startup entries, but rather than provide you with a plethora of links, the best to go is Google. Put the name of the startup item into Google's search engine and it will provide you with the best link to answer your question. Naturally this can be an exhausting method if you have a list as long as your arm, as most people often do.

A simpler method is to leave checked only the items that relate to your anti-virus products. This method, of course, is not without risks as some programs do require the startup component to be running in order to function (i.e. HotSync Manager if you have a Palm Pilot) and laptops have a number of programs that need to be running, unlike most desktops. You may have to go back and forth between this program and rebooting your system to determine what you need and what you don't.

Your next stop is the Services tab. Now, this is certainly an area in which you do not want to make a mistake, but it goes hand in hand with the changes you have made in the Startup tab. For now we are going to leave the Microsoft services alone and check off "Hide All Microsoft Services" to shorten the list and provide us only with information regarding third party applications and services that start up when the system does. There are some services you want to leave in here, such as printer services, anti-virus services, and even the Office Source Engine, but there are plenty of services that end up here that aren't necessary. As with the Startup tab, some services need to be running for some hardware to function properly, so care should be taken when disabling features.

Additionally, another way to change which services are running is to use the services.msc tool found in the Administrative Tools section of your Control Panel or by typing "services.msc" in Run instead of MSCONFIG. This will provide you with more information about what each service is and what it does. By double-clicking on the service you can then choose to disable it permanently. This is a little more time consuming than the alternative method in MSCONFIG but can be much more thorough.

The last step in this area is found on the "Boot.ini" tab. On this tab you will see a choice near the bottom of the window that says "/NOGUIBOOT." Put a check mark in the box next to it. This will turn off the Windows splash screen when your computer boots up, shaving a small but significant one or two seconds of your load time. This may not seem like much time shaved but when you add up all these reductions you will see significant improvements. Once you're done in there be sure to hit Apply and Close to save your changes and be sure to reboot in order to see these changes in your system's performance.

Our next step in manually tuning the operating system is in the Control Panel. From the Control Panel we will go into the System Properties area. In there we will find a tab labeled "Advanced." On this tab there are two areas we are going to make adjustments to: Performance and Startup/Recovery. In the Performance area the default option is "Let Windows Decide What is Best for My Computer" and all the options below that are checked off. If you choose "Adjust for Best Performance" you will see all these features become unchecked. Wow. Personally, I then choose the last option of "Custom" and turn on the last four on the list out of personal preference.

After this step under the Startup/Recovery section we are going to make one change. We will uncheck the "Automatically Restart" option under System Failure. You want to make this change because Windows XP is designed to automatically reboot when a catastrophic failure occurs in Windows. These failures would normally produce a dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) but Windows XP is designed to automatically reboot in order to correct the problem. It's a great idea except on those many occasions when the problem is bigger than a simple reboot can correct and your system will just continuously reboot and reboot until you notice because the problem lies not with Windows but with either your hardware or a third party application. Especially in the case of many viruses this can result in out of control infection rates as a lot of viruses "reproduce" when the computer reboots. What this will do instead of cause you to have a Blue Screen of Death is provide you with the information you need to properly troubleshoot your issues.

After this it is worthwhile to turn off the Remote Assistance options under the Remote tab and to disable Automatic Windows Updating. As a matter of performance the ability of Windows to automatically update itself can result in software problems from updates and their often unexpected side effects. For example, they may draw on bandwidth you'd rather put into your MMORPG or video downloads. Many will argue the importance of keeping your Windows product up-to-date, but as a performance consideration unnecessary updating can cause significant decreases in the speed of your system and most updates address very specific problems (outside of some cumulative security updates) that may or may not affect you. If it isn't broke, why fix it?


Spybot: Search and Destroy and Lavasoft's Adaware SE are two programs that I most often use for ongoing maintenance on my system and for troubleshooting many issues. Spybot: Search and Destroy has been a leading provider of anti-spyware solutions for a number of years and its immunizing function is incredibly useful. However, it is not its ability to hunt down and remove spyware that I most recommend this program for. It's the advanced tools it also contains.

To see these "hidden" tools in Spybot you need to switch your Mode from Default to Advanced. This will add three more choices at the bottom of the side navigation bar of the program. One of these choices is "Tools;" this is where all the goodies are kept. There are three great tools in here: System Internals, IE Tweaks, and Resident.

System Internals will scan your system for registry entries that use incorrect file names or use non-existent paths and help you remove them. This will help to streamline your registry, especially if you happen to install and uninstall lots of programs. The IE Hosts section provides you with the ability to implement three miscellaneous locks to apply to your browser and system. These are especially effective in order to either remove browser hijack infections or to act as a proactive method of preventing these attacks. Lastly, the Resident section provides you with the ability to protect Internet Explorer from bad downloads with the SDHelper utility, but it's the TeaTimer that excites me the most.

TeaTimer allows you to protect your system settings from change without your explicit approval. For example, if you make any changes to the system registry through the MSCONFIG utility it will prompt you to either accept or deny this change. You can also tell the program to remember your decision. The real power of this background application running is that if a viral infection ends up on your system and tries to make changes to the registry, this program will detect it and prompt you to allow or deny this change. You prevent infections as they are happening rather than dealing with them once you're already infected.

Lavasoft's Adaware SE is one of many programs out there that provides you with the ability to remove adware from your system. Why do I recommend Adaware over other programs out there? Well, there are a number of reasons: 1) it's fast and does a good job at what it does and 2) most importantly it is from a very reputable company: Lavasoft. The program has expanded over the years to ignore most cookies on your system and does a good job of removing the source of your annoying pop-up ads, rather than just the ad itself, as most pop-up blockers do.

CCleaner is another great utility program that is exceptionally fast and efficient at removing unwanted temporary files from your computer (most often in under a second!). What makes this program so great is that during the installation you can choose not to have a listing made for it under Program Files in your Start menu and not to create a shortcut on your desktop. So how do you use the program then? Well, you can choose to have it added to your Recycle Bin. That's right, when you right click on your Recycle Bin in order to empty it you can choose instead to either Run or Open CCleaner. For the first time you should open it and customize its cleaning options to remove only the temporary files you want to have removed. Personally, I want to keep my cookies so I choose to not have it clean that folder. However, it still cleans my temp folders, my recycle bin, my history and all sorts of places on my hard drive in less than one second! The first time is the longest but if you can remember to run this program before you shut down every day it will do its cleaning in the blink of an eye and let you computer boot up feeling as close to as fresh as a daisy as a mass of silicon parts can feel.


Now that we've covered several manual tweaks you can do in Windows and a number of great maintenance utilities to keep your system clean and healthy, it's time to dig into that engine and add some extra horsepower to it. There are a number of ways to do this, but we're only going to talk about four specific tools: Erunt, RegCleaner, TuneXP by DriverHeaven and Microsoft's BootVis.

BootVis is a little known illegitimate child of Microsoft's that was meant to be used by system and software developers to identify problems with their programs and the Windows XP operating system when resuming from standby or hibernate and on cold boots. BootVis is a visualization and tracing program that provides a read out on what your system is loading and how long it takes to load that program during startup. It is not an official program of Windows XP and is not available for download from Microsoft's website. It does, however, include an optimization utility that will improve your system startup fractionally. Typical results are the reduction of load times by one to five seconds depending on the machine.

Erunt is a unique tool for backing up your registry, especially before you start to make changes to it. Once you've backed up the registry you can use the optimizer to boost the overall performance of your system. Once you've done that you can use RegCleaner to clean up old and unnecessary information in the registry. Often programs, especially a lot of freeware and shareware, do not uninstall properly and leave behind redundant information in the system registry. By using RegCleaner you can easily and efficiently clean up the registry and add a little more horsepower to the backbone of your Windows operating system.

TuneXP, on the other hand, is one of the crème de la crème of tuning programs out there. Currently it is in version 1.5 and is available for download from a number of online sources. TuneXP is considered to be one of the best and finest tuning tools available, and the best part is it's free!

TuneXP allows the user to the adjust their Memory and File Settings with such great abilities as Disabling the Paging Executive (for 512 MB of RAM or more), Faster Shutdowns, File Allocation Size Tweaks, and Improving NTFS Performance. Its greatest tool is the ability to rearrange your boot files by moving them to the edge of the drive and then defragmenting the drive. This can result in improving boot times by nearly 300%!!

There a number of other tweaks in the program, including the ability to increase your DNS cache to access network resources faster, increase the speed of USB polling and increase your CPU's priority for primary services over background functions. This program will also provide access to a little known tool from previous versions of Windows known as System File Checker (SFC) that will check your system to make sure your Windows files are valid.

Conclusion

Needless to say there are a number of ways and tools out there to improve the performance of your "dream machine" and to provide you with the satisfaction of knowing that your hardware is working as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Try some of these tweaks out and let's hear what you have to say about them