Admiral Michael said:
I seem to have the opposite effect. My system slows down.
Mastershakes, what do u do to keep your install running so well. I try hard to keep mine running well but it never seems to do any good.
Various things, but mostly when I first set it up, I went through everything.... services, start up BS, researched every single running process.
With the help of black viper's website, I adjusted the Windows Services accordingly.
Black Viper's site is still under construction, but here's the gist of it someone gleaned b4 he took it down....
LINKY
Once this was done, I had only 18 services/processes left. I went back to 24 later on as I decided I wanted IIS running and such. Then I started spending late nights all over the place on the net, looking at registry tweaks and such to speed her up. At this point, I ran into NTFS.org and several other sites I don't care to mention on this fine forum.
Of course most of the registry changes I made, eventually were offered in little tweak suites you can download. Made life much easier, though I frequently searched out the true registry tweaks behind the GUIs.
After all this, I turned off the bells and whistles, like the animations, shadowing and such. With a 2.4 P4, a fat FSB mobo, and 1 gig of premium RAM - I later turned back on some of the 'pretty flashing lights' that I had quelched. I only turned them on to the point where I saw performance suffer. Swapped out a lower end NVidea and stuck in a mid range ATI - and it got even faster.
Now the 3 years 4 months, once all the system was tweaked, was maintenance. I installed Diskeeper, and set it to run whenever the hell it wanted, as long as it was a low priority (wouldn't mess with anybody's games, email checking sessions... ) Then I got into researching and finding all the temporary caches Windows uses.... then once again, an app came out to do it for me. Crap Cleaner. Every Sunday morning, I click a few favorites that take me to sites that will tell me if there are any updated drivers. I then rip out the old drivers with DriverCleaner or some sort of wizard, and load up the fresh ones. Then I run Anti-spyware, Spybot, and Adaware in succession, making sure they are up to date. Then I manually analyze the drive for fragmentation. Once a month I run a registry cleaner. The registry cleaner managed to mess up a couple of freeware programs at some point, but otherwise it's made my system just a little more streamlined.
The OS has a 10 gig partition to itself (I think it's too much space, but whatevs)
The second partition contains apps. The 3rd, is media. The 4th, a very small one, contains critical drivers and such, and backups of several application installs.
In the end Admiral, it's a huge combination of things that enable the little biatch to run like the dickens. I just made sure when I built the PC all the hardware when put together would have no bottlenecks. ie a slower FSB, or slower clocked RAM, ... anything. Then it was just persistence. I just treat it as a hobby. Whenever I see it stumble, immediately I'm troubleshooting, turning things off, on - looking at error logs, until I figure out what caused it to hiccup. That, combined with keeping her up to date with regards to patches, fixes - has made it stable and fast.
Any new applications that are installed, are scrutinized after installation. Do I need that agent running? Do I need it to run at startup ? ... I went from a PII 266 with 256 RAM to a P4 2.4 1 gig RAM.... but I still behave as if I'm trying to save resources ----- even now that I have plenty.
If you ever need any assistance, or have any further queries as to how to keep your system running sweet, I'll be glad to help you out. Of course, many other members of this forum are always be able to help as well, I don't pretend to know nearly everything - and I've gleaned much of them with regards to information on tweaking and performance.
Much to the dismay of Perris .... my page file is static (hence as far as I know will never fragment) and it's 1.5 gigs.
/shakes rests fingers...