The next section we'll be covering will be file system tweaks. For those that don't know, the filesystem (henceforth FS) is how the O/S stores files and such. Windows XP has two choices in this regard; NTFS and FAT32. Though NTFS is supposed to be superior than FAT32, I decided to stick with FAT32 so that, if XP every died a hard death, I could easily recover all my data without jumping through hoops. All the following tweaks will apply either to just FAT32, or to both. There are no NTFS tweaks.

This isn't so much a tweak as a security feature. Please note that this "tweak" will NOT speed up your computer. In fact, it will slow down your shutdown time considerably. However, if you're paranoid about people stealing your information, it is a must.

1. Go to start | run and type secpol.msc.
2. Navigate to "Local Policies", then "Security Options"
3. Double click on "Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile" and enable it.
   
   Setting the pagefile to clear on shutdown

Congratulations, your swap file will now be cleansed every time your computer shuts down. Though this tweak doesn't improve performance, I thought it was interesting and thus included it. Now to the next tweak.

If you're like me, you have absolutely no use for hibernation, or sleep mode, or standby mode, or any of that other power conservation stuff. Computers don't pull a whole lot of juice anyway...turning off your monitor is enough to keep your energy consumption down. Additionally, my computer dislikes any of these modes and typically refuses to wake up at all.

To turn off hibernation, and in effect free up a fair chunk of harddrive space (equal to your RAM), check your root directory (c:\) for hidden files. If you have a file called hiberfil.sys, hibernation is turned on. If not, ignore this tip.


Hibernation Options
To disable hibernation, go to the control panel. Inside here, choose Power Options, go to the Hibernate tab, and uncheck the Enable hibernation box. Congratulations, your computer will no longer hibernate.

This tweak will help reduce WinXP boot times. Apparently, WindowsXP will attempt to detect new hard drives on every boot, looking for primary and secondary drives on both IDE controllers. If (like me) you don't have primary and secondary drives on both of your IDE controllers, you can probably reduce your boot times by following this tip.

1. Right-click on my computer and choose properties.
2. Click on the hardware tab, then the device manager button about halfway down the page.
3. Find the IDE/ATAPI Controllers and double-click on them to bring up the properties.
4. Choose the advanced tab.
5. For any channel that you don't have a device on, change the device type to disabled. This will cause WinXP to NOT attempt to detect a drive on this channel.

Disabling unnecessary IDE channels
You will need to repeat these steps for the secondary IDE controller, if applicable. Once you've completed this tweak, the next time you boot you should see a decreased boot time.

This tweak revolves around allowing DMA access to IDE devices. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, and will considerably enhance the performance of the device (or, at least, decrease the processor load). Apparently WinXP fails to properly set this mode for CD-ROMs, though I would also check your hard drive channels to make sure they are set for DMA as well.

We'll need to be in the same place as the above tweak.

1. Right-click on my computer and choose properties.
2. Click on the hardware tab, then the device manager button about halfway down the page.
3. Find the IDE/ATAPI Controllers and double-click on them to bring up the properties.
4. Choose the advanced tab.
5. Set the transfer mode to "DMA if available".

DMA mode if available

You will need to set this for any IDE devices you have, on both channels.

WinXP sports a great new feature called boot defragging, which basically takes all startup files and groups them together on the hard disk for faster access. This, in turn, speeds boot times considerably. Please note that this option is typically enabled, but on certain releases it comes disabled.

To see if it is enabled on your computer, we need to run regedit.

1. Go to start | run and type regedit.
2. Navigate to the following key
   
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
3. Choose Enable from the right pane.
4. If the value is Y, boot defrag is enabled. I highly recommend having it set to Y.

Boot Defrag is Enabled

And that does it for this tweak. Congratulations...between this tip and the last (assuming boot defrag was disabled), you should see a considerable decrease in boot time.

This tip is also present in my Win2k tweak guide. Apparently, Microsoft still didn't get this part right, and all your ATA66 or faster hard drives will still be running at considerably slower ATA33 speeds.

To implement this tweak, and allow your harddrives to operate more efficiently, we will need to fire up regedit again.

1. Go to start | run and type regedit.
2. Navigate to the following key.
   
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystem CurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000
3. Add a new dword and call it EnableUDMA66, then give it a value of 1.

You will need to restart the computer for the changes to take effect. However, you should notice a definite performance increase relating to hard drive access.

And that does it for the file system tweaks. Congratulations, we're well on our way to a faster and slimmer WinXP