Optimizing Win XP
 

I am about to upgrade to win xp pro on my pc and I want to run it as stripped as possible, I don't have the worlds best pc 1100 mg 384 ram. I understand that it is quite a bloated program is there any sites or can you give me any advice on what software I should have loading through msconfig.

It is just gaming mainly.

Here are some services you can disable.

By 1100mg did you mean 1.1GHz? And 384MB of memory? Man, thats smokin' compared to my Pentium 3 450MHz and 224MB of memory. My parent's computer that I just gave you the specs of is not very powerful at all in todays standards, but it was able to run WinXP Pro pretty decently, actually. Just avoid bloated programs that run in the background and you should be fine.

Meh, go to MSCONFIG and don't bother with the services. Turn of all of teh startup items though.

first thing I do is turn off the indexing service..

other than that you can download tweakui (m$ powertoy) and get around some things

Your PC is fine for Windows XP. While just using XP and its services, you really can't notice a difference from a 3 GHz PC and a 1 GHz PC. Games and other apps are different of course, but XP is really not a system hog compared to other programs. I've installed XP on a 133 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM.

In visual effects, I always disable ALL performance effects except for "Show Windows contents while dragging" and "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop." The rest DO make your computer slower. Disabling the rest of the stuff will improve performance.

-Lasereth

You can make a stripped down install cd using a program called nlite available here . My computer seems more responsive since I started using the stripped down install, although I have no benchmarks to compare to.

Thanks all, I will have to let you know the results. Hopefully I will have enough cash by next weekend to get it.

Please do not follow BlackViper's recommendations for services to disable. Disabling services does not speed up your computer in any kind of an appreciable fashion and can cause a fair amount of damage if you disable stuff that is necessary. Without taking the thread too far off course, your best optimizations are lots of RAM, the TweakXP stuff, and other Microsoft recommended performance optimizations.