[videogeek]

Does anybody use a program like TweakXP?


Let's say you have a fresh install of XP, downloaded and installed all the updates, and have all your hardware installed.

Would it not be beneficial to now disable some of the stuff that runs at startup and tweak the registry to get better performance?

 

[pen25]

yes it would be.. just remeimber the settings you change so you can go back to what it was incase somehting goes wrong

 

[saleh]

I rebuilt my HTPC recently, and disabled the following services immediately:

Distributed link tracking client

DNS Client

IPSEC Services

Network Location Awareness (NLA)

Portable media serial number

QoS RSVP

Universal Plug and Play Device Host

Upload manager

WebClient

Wireless Zero Configuration


The only one on the list that might be controversial is DNS Client. This should really be called "DNS Local Cache" -- DNS will work just fine, but the client computer will make more DNS requests. DNS Client generally causes more problems than it solves.


For disabling services, a good technique is to create a second hardware profile, set it as the default after a short period (e.g. 3 seconds), and disable services only for that hardware profile. That way, you can revert to a full default configuration easily, and do A/B comparisons to see if a disabled service is what is breaking an application.


Other than disabling unnecessary services, there are few registry tweaks that make much difference, other than memory management. As cheap as memory is, I put 512MB in my machine and disabled paging entirely, but DisablePagingExecutive might be more appropriate if you have 256MB or so.

 

[civic5zigen]

Black Viper is got one of the best and well writen "XP Service" guide on the net. I disable 80 percent of my services and I am still able to do connect to network and browse the net and all.

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

 

[frbie]

Hello,


some time ago I found a review about the question how much perfomance the de-activation brings you. The result is that it is more or less unneccesary or useless.


The review is in german but the chats are usable.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...light=services

 

[yogaman]

See also Progear guide .


Although it's directed at the ProGear web tablet, the section on tweaking XP Pro for this very modest CPU (about 200 MHz P3 equivalent) is very good. The author and others report that the resulting stripped down system is at least as fast as Win98SE.


-yogaman

 

[videogeek]

saleh, thanks for the post - I believe some of your listed services are the ones I am looking for

Frank, thanks for the link - I am originally from the German part of Switzerland - no problem reading the article.

If somebody wonders: The tests they made showed basically an improvement of about 4% SysMark 2002 performance with 128MB of RAM in the system and practically no improvement with 256 MB (or more) of RAM.

The 4% improvement where a result of gaining back about 11.5MB of physical RAM


Therefore I have to reformulate my original question a bit

I have a 2.53GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM in my HTPC; I don't need faster performance or freeing up RAM - so here it goes:


What XP tweaks, registry modifications and startup changes are beneficial to a HTPC for:


Improved DVD playback

no interruption

unnecessary background tasks


example: I really don't need messenger on my HTPC and I believe (I may be wrong) messenger is not just your basic app - it probably depends on quite a few other things running; do I need them?

I don't mind having a restore point saved every few days, but what else is going on in the background, checking, calling Bill daily, etc.?


I am asking this question because I run XP on my work PC and when I installed it fresh the PC was booting in record time - so fast, I was surprised.

Now, a few month later it takes minutes for that thing to come up - at least 10 times as long. And I defragment my drives and I have not to many apps installed.

I would like to keep my HTPC as clean as possible but I do want to use it for Divx encoding (that's why the fast CPU and 1GB of RAM), mp3 server, etc.


thx again for your help

 

[videogeek]

Great link yogaman, thx