Tips 4 XP/Vista
PUTTING YOUR PAGGING FILE ON A SECOND HARD DRIVE WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
Splitting up the pagefile and your everyday apps is common sense. Doing this allows Windows to dump temp junk onto one drive while not having to interrupt reads or writes on the other. If you have two hard drives, this is a tip that definitely works and works well: Expect at least a 5 to 10 percent speed boost, depending on the existing speed of your rig and, especially, the performance of your drives. But any second drive will help at least a little: While not recommended, you can even put the pagefile on an external USB drive and see some performance gains.
CLEANING OUT CACHED AND TEMP FILES IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, ESPECIALLY OF YOUR WEB BROWSER
Unless you have so much junk on your hard drive that you are nearly out of free space, deleting any number of files-whether they’re temp files or permanent ones-won’t improve performance at all. The only exceptions to the rule are for programs or processes that involves every file on your drive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for examples, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It make sense to clear this files out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’t get a performance boost for your trouble.
DON’T DO IT
TURNING OF SYSTEM RESTORE IMPROVES PERFORMANCE
System restore is a real aid when it comes to rolling back bad Windows patches and driver updates, but by its very nature, it is said to impact performance because it’s always creating restore points, thus robbing you of a little power. The truth: System Restore lurks idle most of the time and rarely does anything at all, creating checkpoints only during app installs plus once every 24 hours by default. Even then it spends only a few seconds doing so and only during idle time. It’s virtually unthinkable that you’d try to run a program at the exact same time that System Restore began creating a restore point, and even if you did, you probably wouldn’t notice. The proof is in the benchmarks: We got nearly identical results on PCMark whether System Restore was on or off. [Note, however, that System Restore can consume a fair amount of disk space-this is configurable-so if gigabytes are precious to you, consider throttling it back.]
DON’T DO IT
Windows XP For Dummies, 2nd Edition
