First of all, this tweak only apply to those who only have one HDD on their primary IDE channel (nothing else on device 0 or 1) and a CD-ROM and/or DVD-ROM on the secondary IDE channel. Each time you boot Windows XP, there's an updated file called NTOSBOOT-*.pf who appears in your prefetch directory (%SystemRoot%Prefetch) and there's no need to erease any other files as the new prefetch option in XP really improves loading time of installed programs. We only want WindowsXP to boot faster and not decrease its performance. Thanks to Rod Cahoon (for the prefetch automation process...with a minor change of mine) and Zeb for the IDE Channel tweak as those two tricks, coupled together with a little modification, result in an EXTREMELY fast bootup:
1. Open notepad.exe, type "del c:windowsprefetch tosboot-*.* /q" (without the quotes) & save as "ntosboot.bat" in c:
2. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "gpedit.msc".
3. Double click "Windows Settings" under "Computer Configuration" and double click again on "Shutdown" in the right window.
4. In the new window, click "add", "Browse", locate your "ntosboot.bat" file & click "Open".
5. Click "OK", "Apply" & "OK" once again to exit.
6. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "devmgmt.msc".
7. Double click on "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
8. Right click on "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties".
9. Select the "Advanced Settings" tab then on the device 0 or 1 that doesn't have 'device type' greyed out select 'none' instead of 'autodetect' & click "OK".
10. Right click on "Secondary IDE channel", select "Properties" and repeat step 9.
11. Reboot your computer.
WindowsXP should now boot REALLY faster.
Boot XP real Fast
Run Disk Clean-Up
Both Windows and application programs tend to leave temporary files lying around on your hard drive, taking up space. A hard drive that is close to being “full” can cause Windows to slow down or
interfere with efficient disk access and virtual memory operations.
If you surf the web a lot, your temporary internet files folder can become quite large, causing Internet Explorer to slow down or malfunction. Cleaning up unneeded files, scanning for disk errors
and defragmenting the hard drive can help to restore some zip to your system. Try to run once a month for peak performance.
1. Double-click the My Computer icon.
2. Right-click on the C: drive
3. Select Properties
4. Click the Disk Cleanup button (to the bottomright of the Capacity pie graph)
5. Select / check Temporary Internet Files and Recycle Bin
6. Click OK
Reduce Page File Size
Page file size is not constant by default. Due to this, the operating system has to resize the file each time more space is required. This is a performance overhead. All you have to do is to set the file size to a reasonable limit.
Follow the steps:
1. Right-click My Computer, Select Properties
2. Click the Advanced tab
3. Click the Settings button under the Performance section
4. Click the Advanced tab
5. Under the Virtual Memory section click the Change button
6. "Virtual Memory" dialogue box will appear (also shown in the figure below)
7. Highlight the C: drive containing page file
8. Select the Custom Size radio button and give same values in Initial size and Maximum size fields:
If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have 512MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size.
9. Click Set, then OK buttons to apply the changes
Enable Direct Memory Access (DMA)
1. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties
2. Select the Hardware tab
3. Click the Device Manager button
4. Double-click IDE/ATAPI controllers
5. Double-click on the Primary IDE Channel
6. Click on the Advanced Settings tab (as shown in figure) The tab may or may not be available for each option. It is only available in Primary and Secondary Channels.
7. Set the Transfer Mode to "DMA if Available" both for Device 1 and 0
8. Click OK
9. Perform the same operation for other items in the list, if applicable.
Speed-Up File Browsing
You may have noticed that every time you open “My Computer” to browse folders that there is a slight delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers every time you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing speed significantly:
1. Double-click on My Computer
2. Click the Tools menu
3. Select Folder Options
4. Click on the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box
6. Click Apply
7. Click OK
8. Reboot your computer
Optimize Display Settings
Windows XP can look sexy but displaying all the visual items can waste system resources. To optimize:
1. Click the Start button
2. Select Control Panel
3. Double-click the System icon
4. Click the Advanced tab
5. In the Performance box click Settings
6. Leave only the following ticked:
a. Show shadows under menus
b. Show shadows under mouse pointer
c. Show translucent selection rectangle
d. Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
e. Use visual styles on windows and buttons
7. Finally, click Apply and OK
