Any real reason Windows operate slower and slower as days go by?

[0roo0roo]

yea, just make sure to use ghost right after you install windows and all your basic apps/office apps+all auto updates. keep o/s on small partition and restoring windows to squeeky clean condition is a snap.

going into system properties/advanced/performace settings/ and setting memory usage to disc cache if you've got oodles of mem might help. install and use spyware blaster/adaware

 

[Amused]

I'm going on two years for this install. It's not slow at all.

 

[Looney]

Not for me. My 'server' has been running windows xp pro for a year, and it runs and boots just as quickly as my newly formatted system (about 2 months). They have the exact same CPU speed, memory amount, and videocard.

 

[0roo0roo]

swear my system just got faster after removing a load of spyware maybe its all in my head though.

 

[0roo0roo]

http://infoprosjoint.net/ij5/archive/topic/2676-1.html
However, in Windows XP, all you have to do is:

1. Right click My Computer
2. Select Properties
3. Click Advanced
4. Choose Performance
5. Click Advanced again
6. Select either Programs or System Cache under Memory Usage.

Programs = 0 for the registry tweak equilavent
System Cache = 1 for the registry tweak equilavent


On XP (Server), the Large System Cache option is enabled, but disabled on Workstation. The two different settings effect how the cache manager allocates free memory. If the Large Cache option is on, the manager marks all the free memory, which isn't being used by the system and/or applications, as freely available for disk caching. On the flip-side (with a small cache), the manager instead only sets aside 4MB of memory for disk caching in an attempt to accelerate the launch of applications. Or in a more technical approach, if enabled the system will favor system-cache working sets over process working sets (with a working set basically being the memory used by components of a process).

 

[0roo0roo]

http://kadaitcha.ath.cx/articles/performance.aspx
Tweak #5: Memory Management and Processor Scheduling

256MB RAM is the absolute minimum to take advantage of these changes. Those with faster Pentium 4's should see a significant performance boost. You should not perform any registry edits unless you know what you are doing. At the very least, you should consider performing a backup before proceeding.

Memory Management: Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning

The "DisablePagingExecutive" entry in the registry prevents the kernel (the core of the XP OS) from being rolled out to the page file. The effect of this part of the tweak is to cause the OS to cache the OS Kernel and its entourage to RAM instead of to disk, which makes XP far more responsive.

The "LargeSystemCache" registry entry forces XP to allocate all but 4MB of system memory, that is system memory, not avaliable RAM, to the file system cache. The remaining 4MB of system memory is used for disk caching, though XP will allocate more memory if it is needed.

A modern hard disk will transfer sequential data to and from disk at up to 40MB per second, or even faster on some drives, but the LargeSystemCache tweak means that effective transfer speeds of 1GB per second or more can be obtained, depending on the amount of RAM in your system and its operating speed. This is achieved because the LargeSystemCache modification causes the OS to store data read from disk in RAM. It means that the OS is always using the optimum amount of RAM instead of leaving it untouched for future use that may or may not occur. Without this part of the tweak, 200MB or more of RAM in a typical 512MB machine goes completely unused.

Some I/O intensive applications may take a hit in performance from changing the LargeSystemCache, so this particular component of the tweak should not be applied to a system that is running either SQL Server or Internet Information Server (IIS) because both of those applications perform their own caching.

Start regedit and navigate to the following key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]

Add these two lines, save the changes and reboot;

"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

To see the effects of this part of the tweak, launch a large, memory hungry application. Any of the Microsoft Office suite of applications will do. Let the application load then exit from it. Fasten your safety harness then launch the application again.

I have a striped RAID 0 array of two ATA100 7,200 RPM disks. The array was lounging around on holiday in the sun and not doing much with a SiSoft Sandra Drive Index of 28,000. The two registry changes above caused the DI to triple from the original 28,000 to an upper mark of 85,000. A similar but scaled down performance increase can be expected for ATA 33/66 disks.