Analog5:002 Article 008

Keeping Your Windows Box Alive

By: Max302
Published: March 20th, 2007

Everybody hears the same thing over and over and over again on IRC, podcasts, from friends, wherever:

I cant keep my Windows XP install on my PC longer than 3 months, it’s friggin annoying.

You know what? Then you are doing something wrong. So instead of bitching about Microsoft like everybody does, I’m going to deliver in this article 5 ways of optimizing your Windows XP box and avoid all that useless bitching.

Step 1: Take Care of Your Registry

Everybody knows that the big flaw in Windows product is the registry. As soon as you start installing software, hundreds of entries are created, and after that, they are not necessarily well organized or maintained, or even check for validity, which causes fragmentation of information, and storage of useless data.

Since Microsoft did not thing beforehand of creating a registry cleaner to be shipped with it’s products some third part software is necessary. Usually, I opt for opensource or freeware solutions for my articles, but in this field, there is no free alternative, so you might end up spending a couple of bucks for a registry cleaner.

Basically, you have two choices. Well known registry cleaners are either the AMUST Registry Cleaner or PCTool’s Registry Mechanic. The two are basically the same thing, with easy scanning and repair as well as compacting of your registry on all version of Windows from 95 to XP SP2, with the only important difference being the price, which is 50 $USD for Registry Mechanic and 30 $USD for AMUST’s product.

Personally, I have used the two and don’t have a specific recommendation. It seems to me as the two do the exact same job, but considering the fact that PCTools has received many awards for it’s software, you might want to go with them if you have a couple more bucks to spend.

Once you have one of those purchased, scan every week or biweekly, or pretty much everytime you feel like it or if you know you have been installed and uninstalling stuff. The scan itself should take only about 10 minutes top on a slow system with lots of errors, and fixing is a matter of seconds usually. As for performance gains, they are important even on a machine with a relatively fresh install of XP. The changes are usually felt as soon as you reboot. Another important thing is compacting the registry, which should be done every 2 months or so. These makes you registry much more consistant and the search time for entries is decreased by much. Since pretty much every program that runs under Windows uses the registry, this speeds up your computer LOTS.

Step 2: Defrag More Often

This is a simple thing that is very often neglected. The fact that information is spread around your hard drive(s) can be a factor to a slow machine, this is specially true if you don’t have NCQ on your disks, which is still to be mass implemented, or if you have slower disks like the 4200 or 5400 RPMs usually found in a laptop.

I suggest defragging every month or so, less if you have a tendency to move less files around. Also, remember that to defrag properly, you must have the least possible programs running on your machine at the time of the defrag, to prevent files in use of being skipped. You might want to do this overnight to not waste precious time.

Personally, I find that Microsoft’s built-in defrag tool is enough for what has to be done, but if you want, you can Google up some commercial solutions, at a cost.

A good practice would also be to regularly clean your disk with Microsoft’s disk cleaning tool, found on the same panel as the defrag tool. Looks like something useless, but I save 500-600 megabytes only by clearing out my temporary files and MS Office install files.

Step 3: Manage Your RAM

Everybody knows that now, for the average user, the minimum required RAM to run XP smoothly is 512 MB. However, even with the required 512, there are still some limitations, and some machines may crash upon more memory intensive applications such as games on these machines with less RAM. I had this problem on my laptop, once every two times, my machine crashed and froze when I connected to an Enemy Territory server and loaded the maps.

Crashes can be caused by many things, including overheating hardware, a possible scenario for a laptop, but I discovered that what made my machine crash is the saturation of the RAM. To remedy this, I downloaded a tool called FreeRAM XP Pro. This freeware tool is designed to watch on your machine’s RAM usage, optimize it, and clear it when necessary, saving you the crash that you would normally get on a case of memory saturation.

As was said earlier, the tool is totally free, and available from YourWareSolution’s website.

Step 4: Remove the Fluff

Windows XP comes loaded with services and features that most of us more advanced users do not need. The obvious is course the XP theme, which in itself does take up some system resources, but there are also less obvious ways of increasing your machine’s performance by removing some useless services and features.

First thing to look at is the visual options. Right click on My Computer and go to Properties. Under the Advanced tab, you will find a button entitled Performance. Click it, and explore the options. If you really want to go total performance wise, then uncheck them all, at the cost of the loss of some basic visual effects like character smoothing. In general, everything that concerns animations and shadows are useless, so you can uncheck them, and for the rest, you can experiment with it at will, as they are reversible at all times.

Another tip that could increase your system performance by loads, but this time is slightly more dangerous, is the managing of system services. There are plenty of guides on the thing and that personally, I haven’t tested them all, I can only point you to the lot, but chances are that you will quickly find a good one. Be careful, removing a critical service can possibly mean kill your machine.

Personally, since I did not need a huge gain for what I do with my computer, I simply listen to the advice given to me by SiSoft Sandra’s computer analysis tool. The tool looks at your system component by component, and list the possible upgrades and configuration improvements. Although in this case the services to be disabled list is smaller than in other guides, but the suggested removals are much safer. But Sandra doesn’t just give tips about services, lots of hardware and BIOS setting recommendations can be found in a report.

Step 5: Protect Your Baby

Breaking news: Windows machines are vulnerable to viruses and spyware. Scary. So get an Anti-virus. Many people, including advanced users neglect the presence of a good AV on their system. Sure, you don’t need to be bulletproof on your machine if you already have security devices on your upstream network, but still, between bare and barricaded, there is a balance. My AV suggestion would be Alwil’s Avast AV. Apart from being totally free, it has pretty much the same feature as Symantec’s Norton, without the firewall and the resource hogging.

Apart from a comprehensive list of virus that is frequently updated, Avast also includes many live filters for potential Peer to Peer, Mail, and Web threats that are very effective, detecting malware faster than you can recognize it. Just like Norton, it scans everything real time according to your specifications, and alerts you whenever it finds something suspicious. It does not include a firewall, but in my opinion, the Windows Firewall does a pretty good job of filtering unwanted traffic. Usually, common sense will tell you if you have to scan files or not, but a good in depth scan every 5-6 months is always good too.

There you are. Follow these steps, and I guarantee that scrapping your Windows install will be much tougher.

-Max302