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XP on an old system

silverpig

silverpig

Lifer
I had enough of trying to use the g/f's old old Pentium 1 (not even mmx territory either) with win98 so I grabbed a few spare parts and built her a P3 450, 256 MB ram, 20 gig, sb live 5.1, DVD, ATI Rage pro 128 system. All she does is email/msn/web browse/solitare so it's plenty for her. I put on an extra copy of XP that I have laying around.

It's night and day over her old system, but it could probably use a bit of tweaking still. She doesn't care about eye-candy so I can turn off a lot. Already did away with the fade-effects, drop shadows etc, switched to windows classic UI, but what else is there? Performance is okay, but I'd like to speed it up a little more if possible. I don't want to do any registry hacks because it's her system and I don't want to break anything for fear of having to support it later. Just simple things. What am I forgetting?

TIA
 
Turn off unnecessary services (lots of guides for this). Don't allow apps to auto start with Windows boot. If on dialup, use TweakDUN for faster page loading.
 
Even on the newest systems I turn off all animations under the device manager >> performance settings. Like the start menu, taskbar buttons, etc. Also it's very important to disable the translucent selection rectangle, that setting will take even 1+GHz machines and make them into slow crawlers.
 
Turn off the Themes service, Wireless, etc, etc. Look up some guides on what Services actually do...
BTW to get to the Services, you can right click on My Computer and select Manage from the pulldown.
 
Originally posted by: KoolDrew
Turn off unnecessary services (lots of guides for this)
Click to expand...

That won't affect performance at all. No recourses will be used by the service if it is not in direct use.
Click to expand...

An idle service, if started, will still use up RAM. While RAM isn't necessarily the main issue here, I'd still disable the services I know I wouldn't use if on a system like his.
 
Should be plenty usable on that machine. How much processes do you have at bootup? Just keep the startup items down to a bare minimum. Tweaking services helps decrease RAM usage as well. I know I am able to turn off a ton without any problems, but since its her computer you may not wanna go the extra step for a little RAM usage savings.
 
Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
Originally posted by: KoolDrew
Turn off unnecessary services (lots of guides for this)
Click to expand...

That won't affect performance at all. No recourses will be used by the service if it is not in direct use.
Click to expand...

An idle service, if started, will still use up RAM. While RAM isn't necessarily the main issue here, I'd still disable the services I know I wouldn't use if on a system like his.
Click to expand...

If the memory is needed for something else the amount taken up by the service will be down to near nothing.

 
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