YOU CAN TWEAK VIRTUAL MEMORY SETTINGS FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
In the Windows 95/98 era, conventional wisdom held that you should manually set your virtual memory [i.e., pagefile] size to at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM in order to optimize performance. [By default, Windows will manage pagefile on its own: You will likely find the initial pagefile size set to 0.5x or 1x the amount of RAM you have]. We were skeptical about this tip, but our benchmarks surprised us: Some systems showed no change at all, but some(particularly older machines) showed substantial improvement beyond the usual random noise we see in benchmark results. We got at least a 10 percent jump after we upped the initial pagefile size to 2x amount or RAM on two separate machines. It won’t work for all computers, so the jury’s still out on this one, but because it’s so easy to do and there are no negative consequences, it’s worth a shot just to see if it has any effect.
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.
WRITE CACHING WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE ON SATA DRIVES
This feature is disabled by default in VISTA because if your computer loses power before a write is completed,you can lose data. If you’re confident in your UP’s capabilities, crank it up and you’ll see at least a 10 percent improvement in performance. Remember, write caching is supported only on SATA drives. The options are grayed out for older ATA disks.
DISABLING UNUSED NETWORK CONNECTIONS WILL IMPROVE BOOT TIME
Say you set up a network drive for a network drive for a computer you had months ago but is no longer on your network: When Windows boot, it spends at least some time reconnecting to that drive, wasting precious seconds you could be spending on Facebook. While XP and Vista are better than older versions of Windows about network connections [who can forget those interminable “Connecting…’ messages?] it still makes sense to disconnect from network shares you no longer need. You won’t actually boot noticeably faster without those extra drive letters, but Explorer will become usable more quickly after launch. This is especially noticeable in Vista, which has a helpful “loading” progress indicator that overlays the address bar: Having any number of network shares will cause it to take any extra 10 to 20 seconds to fully load.
