I don’t like to wait. Few people do, granted, but I really don’t. Standing in line waiting for the twit in front of me to figure out how to work the self check-out machine at the grocery is an exercise in forced patience. I continually resist the urge to reach forward and poke the enormous blinking button on the screen that certifies that “no, indeed I do not have anything under the cart.” The fact that the machine is asking in perfect, crystalline English this exact question doesn’t deter our twit from continuously attempting to run his credit card through the inactive card reader trying ineffectively to pay. Next time, please reserve the self checkout for people capable of following rudimentary instructions.
My impatience extends to my computer as well. I’ve got some number of gigahertz of processor, I have some number of gigabytes of memory, I should not wait for 20 seconds for a previously minimized application to pop up and be responsive. I know the reason but it still irks. It’s worse when I watch Cat switch over to her login and click on her dormant Thunderbird tab and wait. She hates the wait. Doesn’t understand why it’s not popping up now. Clicks the button a couple more times to hurry it along. That drives me nuts, primarily because it’s my computer that is failing us. This beast that is inordinately powerful and can perform miraculous tasks is now struggling gamely to bring an email program up after some time not using it.
I had a big, long explanation up and — even in the presence of the ever-helpful Twilight Autosave… note to self: clicking the “Save and Continue Editing” occasionally is actually not the best way of working when this plugin is around — lost it when I closed my browser. So, instead I’ll just tell you what I’ve done to improve my performance and reduce my waits.
The tweaks, finally
Get more RAM. That seems obvious. I bumped my home machine up to 1.5G of memory and I’m very happy with how snappy things are in comparison.
Defrag your hard drive. Regularly defragmenting your hard drive can help reduce some latency in launching applications especially.
Defrag your page file. The basic Windows defrag utility cannot defragment your page file. The link takes you to a program that can. I was a bit surprised to discover that my page file on my work machine consisted of over 36,000 fragments. You can’t tell me that that didn’t cause some churn.
Turn off the paging executive. This will keep some of the core OS components — kernel, drivers, etc. — in RAM at all times and reduce latency. Note that you should have a minimum of 512M of RAM to do this. Re-read number 1 above.
On that same page there’s instructions for enabling a larger system cache. Do that too.
What will all this buy me?
With these changes Cat and I both are much happier. On my home machine it used to take 30 seconds to switch users between our accounts. Now it happens almost instantly. If I’m flying around in Google Earth and decide to look up something in Firefox, it responds immediately instead of churning for 10 seconds.
Now to find a solution to the self checkout line. I’m thinking some sort of bladed weapon. Preferably long.
One Response to “Improving Windows XP performance”
CF, I have been using Diskeeper Pro for sometime now (2 Years), and have to say that it is the best tool to automate everything you have mentioned in this publication, and I agree with everything you have mentioned.