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Coupla things to look at... Posted by ChuckD [Email] (#2127) [Profile/Gallery] (more from ChuckD) on Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:53:24 In Reply to: XP getting slow?, Dean, Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:02:53 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
(I've been paid to support the Windows OS for many years)
Whenever I build a new machine there are two settings I can rely on to make the system faster:
First is to confirm the integrity of the data on the drive(s). This means opening a command window and typing:
chkdsk /f
You will need to reboot to make this run, do so.
Then disable the Indexing service and also disable the indexing property on all drives (in Windows Explorer, right-click on the your C: drive , choose 'Properties' from the menu. Uncheck 'Allow Indexing Service to....').
The next is to add a registry entry. I'm posting the new one here but the standard caveats apply, you can severely muck up your system when doing registry edits. Do this at your own risk (but this will speed disk access up).
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
This will require a reboot.
There's other stuff to attend to like making sure there's lots of free space (I get nervous if there's less than 3 GB free on my C: drive) I also prefer to install all my programs to a different drive. Not partition...different physical drive).
The last thing I'd look at is a bit more technical, but that's the block allocation size on the drive. If this drive was an upgrade from Win2000, without a reformat and fresh install, there's a good chance your allocation blocks are too small. Open a command window and type:
chkdsk
It'll do a cursory scan and then spit out some data. Look for "XXXX bytes in each allocation unit". You want this to be 4096. If it's less, you're data's is not efficiently laid out.
This is not exhaustive and I don't spell out each thing, you can Google it for more info, or you can ask and I can supply more detail or online references.
Chuck
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