Often Microsoft love to leave some power-user options open in the registry. In Windows XP, some of these options allow power-users to tweak up Windows and allow it to run at a faster speed.

Caution: Editing your registry is a dangerous execution and requires extreme care. Do back up your registry and revert your registry if you fail to load Windows properly. The following tweaks are tested OK on the author's computer but the author is not to be liable for any data loss, system failure or any problems that derived from this article. These tweaks are tested on Windows XP.

Disable Executive Paging: This means that Windows will attempt to keep pageable drivers and system processes in the RAM instead of the pagefile. When the system accesses the pagefile, it has to wait for the hard disk to locate the file and read the data. This will cause lagging. Therefore if you are able to keep system stuff in the RAM, it will be accessed faster. This tweak is recommended for systems with more than 128MB of RAM.

This option can be accessed from two ways. 1) FreeRAM XP Pro's Advance Memory Configuration menu. 2) The registry. We will not talk about FreeRAM XP Pro's method, but we will talk about the registry method.

Next, we have the Large System Cache option: This option will tell Windows to try to cache and optimize for disk and file operations. This is good as we have mentioned that accessing the disk will take up some time. So if you can enable this, you are able to make your computer faster. However, this tweak reduces the overall free amount of RAM.

Clearing the pagefile after you have used your computer allows you load Windows faster on the next start up. However, the Clear Pagefile at Shutdown option slows down your shutdown time drastically. That's because you might have a very huge pagefile.

Disabling prefetches on Windows is still a very confusing advantage. Many sources saying that clearing out prefetches are good. But there are some persistant sources saying about the disadvantages of the option.

When you clear up the prefetches, you are able to reduce the chances of disk fragmentation. As said earlier on, hard disk requires to locate the file on the disk: if the file is fragmented and placed all over the place, the hard disk will take up more time to locate the file and this slows down the system, and may even cause crashes. This option is good for systems with low specifications.

However, this option is quite useless as Windows will still recreate the prefetches (files with extension .pf). Instead, some sources actually say that cleaning out your prefetch will reduce your system performance. This is yet to be true.

So if you still persist on wanting to use this tweak, follow the following instructions.

Windows do not always unload DLL from the memory. It is good to unload DLL as you are able to free up some memory and this will allow you to run your computer at a better speed.

You can tell your system not to wait for processes to terminate itself before shutting down. Sometimes it can take up to a very long time before the process decides to terminate itself. So you can use the Wait

Decreasing the menu display delays will do some good if you are using a high speed computer. The delay is just not to let the user see the menu being loaded and lagging. It is also to prevent accidental opening of menu in the Start Menu. So if you are precise mouse user, you can enable this weak.

I hope that these tweaks is able to speed up your computer.

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