Chapter 34: Tuning Windows XP for Maximum Performance
Chapter Introduction Windows XP automatically sets itself up to give you adequate performance. That performance is greatly improved over Windows Me, but you can still improve it. Several tools enable you to to enhance performance, primarily disk performance:
- The Performance Options dialog box Shows you display, processor, and memory settings that affect performance.
- The Task Manager program Displays the system resources of your computer.
- The System Monitor Displays graphs of system usage.
Another important way to speed up Windows is to tune your hard disk to speed up disk access.
The Microsoft Management Console displays information about your whole system, and can display information about events, performance, devices, storage, and applications.
In our experience, few of the tuning techniques make a noticeable difference on a balanced system with adequate memory and disk, although they do make some difference on small systems with slow disks. The best ways to improve system performance are to add more memory and a faster disk, in that order. Microsoft says Windows XP can run in only 64MB of memory (RAM), but we've tried it, and we recommend at least 128MB.
