I’m mainly talking about system tweaks and windows tweaks, things I can disable, etc. rather than hardware upgrades. I do a lot of music recording and editing, and I’m trying to get every ounce of power out of this aging system through tweaks and so on.
I have a PC running windows XP with a big enough hard drive, enough RAM, etc. The main problem is that the video card is old and weak (it’s an Nvidia Geforce2) and the processor is slower (Pentium 4, 1.8 ghz).
I’ve already disabled almost everything upon startup so that nothing runs in the system tray other than the clock and very few background processes run at any given time (only the necessary ones).
I keep both hard drives defragmented, and I’ve disabled the desktop wallpaper, disabled all system sounds, disabled the screensaver, turned off all visual effects, turned off disk indexing, disabled system restore, uninstalled all of the inessential windows components, and so on.
What are your favorite streamlining and slimming tweaks for XP that people don’t often think about?
Overall, it looks like you’ve got a nice system. Unless you’re doing any gaming, the video card’s nothing to worry about.
As far as tweaks, there’s one major one you can do, but it’ll void your warrenty: overclocking. As long as you’ve got a good cooling system, you should be able to get a few more megahertz out of your processor. How you go about overclocking varies from system to system. You’ll have to search Google for specifics (look up stuff about your motherboard).
(It should be noted that if you have a name-brand, pre-built system, overclocking may be much harder to impossible. It works best with custom made PCs.)
With XP there’s really not all that much you can do beyond what you’ve done and quite frankly disabliing the small system/OS based stuff gains you only a few percent (at best) on an XP Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz system. You can try playing with bus clocking via the BIOS or jumpers, but real world improvements are likely to be negligible, and stability might be adversely affected.
That speed P4 is going to be a bit sluggish for music editing. I have a 1.7 Ghz that the audio software takes almost 100% of all the CPU prpcesses going on. Open the task manager and click on the processes tab to see exactly how much CPU resources are being devoted to each application. Click on the performance tab to see if your using 100% of the CPU resources at anytime.
You can turn off the indexing service for each hard drive. System restore doesn’t affect system speed until you set a restore point. I would still use it once a day to have a convenant rollback point.
Scan your system for spyware, and just to make sure disable your internet connection while you are doing the music editing. W/o the internet to worry about you could also get away w/ disabeling your A/V, firewall, and A/Spyware programs. Be sure you re-enable them before you reconnect to the net.
Run MSCONFIG, make sure what you are running at startup are only the things you need to. If you are not sure of an item google it.