Windows XP Performance Tweak

Windows XP Performance Tweak

This is a direct quote from Cuball's WebLog)

"You need a minimum of 256MB of RAM before you make these changes.

Open your favorite registry editor and navigate to the following key:
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Areas to change are as follows

1. DisablePagingExecutive - Double click it and in the decimal value field, put a 1. This will allow XP to keep data in memory instead of paging sections of RAM to the hard drive.
2. LargeSystemCache - Double click it and change the decimal value to 1. This will allow the XP Kernel to Run in memory.
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it IOPageLockLimit - Double click it and set the value in hex to 4000 if you have 128MB of RAM, 10000 if you have 256MB or 40000 if you have more than 512MB of RAM."

I'm going to have to give this a go when I get home...

Update #1 8/14/2004:
Well I finally got a chance to give these settings a try. My DisablePagingExecutive as 0, so changed it to 1. LargeSystemCache was also 0, now changed to 1.
IOPageLockLimit was already there and set to 1005584384. hum... Much higher than the recommended 40000.

I guess it's time to research IOPageLockLimit.

I/O Pagelock Limit(2000/XP)
TURBO CHARGING your Windows XP Operating System Part 3

Windows XP TWEAKS / Optimization for Video Editing Systems – PART II
"IoPageLockLimit

I have listed this optimization (TWEAK) here because it can have a very negative impact on PC performance if not set properly. The IoPageLockLimit indirectly determines the number of pages Windows will read or write to the hard disk at one time. In other words it determines how much will be locked into memory before swapping. If a system performs a significant number of physical in/out-puts raising the limit can sometimes improve system performance. Get it wrong and performance will be slower and less stable - not to worry you can change it back. Why is there no one optimal setting? Not all systems experience the same amount of file I/O operations, not all systems experience disk I/O bottlenecks in the same way, processor power (performance) varies, disk access & transfer rate, software programs operate differently and memory size all play a part in overall performance. Refer to Section II to understand more about this TWEAK and it´s possibilities...."

"...This can be the "Mother of All Tweaks" both good or bad. Therefore, we will have to dedicate a little extra space (verbiage) here for this one. To do this TWEAK it is not hard and IT IS reversible. First let´s review what this thing does : Windows limits the amount of memory to be locked for I/O operation.
By default, this registry limit value is 0, which is actually 512 kb. This indicates to the system that it should use a built-in algorithm to determine the amount of memory to utilized (i.e. 512 kb). Changing this can force core systems to be kept in memory and not paged to the disk.... "

Okay. Based on this I think my setting was jacked. So I deleted it, rebooted and will try with 65536...

Update #2 8/14/2004:
Looks like these settings can be used on Win2K too... So not being able to leave good enough alone, now that I have 1GB in my notebook I'm giving these same settings a try on it too. I'm hoping that I'll get performance gains, since my NB HD is slow (less paging, so better performance)?

We'll see...