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Unwanted services This is not really a tutorial but a simple guide on how to spice up your XP. Its not extensive, its not complete, its just some ideas which poped in my head and might be of some help to you. The first one, speeding WindowsXP up, by removing unessary background
services. Which increases your available RAM and proccessing power.
It will also decrease load up times of applications. WindowsXP runs fine when u first install it. But the moment you install other applications the fun starts. It starts to get slower and slower and bah...guess what? slower... One of the apps which makes XP very slow, is OfficeXP. By default it installs Voice recogniton software, which is switched on all the time. How to remove those 2 unwanted services? Check the links below. ctfmon.exe - sapisrv - If you have anti virus applikation concider lettim the scan only
when ure idling. (during screensaver). They do slow down your system
(significantly on a low spec machine) There are a few flaws in XP's GUI. Go into you system panel Be sure to disable "Show translucent selecton rectangle"
as it only eat lots of RAM and kills your CPU. If you are person who likes seeing all his files, you will surely have noticed the THUMBS.DB, which really does give me a lot of pain. If you are uploading your newly created website, or accessing your computer from Unix., They will always pop up or be transfered. Delete them once, and the next time you open that folder with explorer in "thumbnail" view they appear again. BAH! Well dont use thumbnail view you might say.....how about just go to into the "tools" menue in explorer > Folder Options > View and check "Do not cache tumbnails" This will prevent windows from creating the Thumbs.db files. Also if you are low on disk space, go into search look for "thumbs.db" and simple delete all files. In some cases those files can add up to several hundred megs, shared around all over your harddisc. If you wanna spice up your desktop...I would suggest moving away
from the very commerical application "windowBlinds" as
it seem to slow down your PC enourmously. If you want a new shell (the default shell in XP is explorer...which manages the desktop icons, startbar, and the windows), a very good one to use is "blackbox, bluebox or fluxbox"(similar with very slight diffrences). Its been very successful in Linux, and has been ported to windows. You can run blackbox and the explorer shell simultanously which is v nice as well. Blackbox wasnt made to be nice and funky, but to be fast..and thats exactly what it is. Altough there are some nice skinz out there for it ;) Well you think it will just work the same way as any other Drive. Well in most cases this will be case, but usually you want to protect your shares with a username/password protection. In windows you will need to reenter that password every single time you enter that share. As there doesnt seem to be a way of saving it. So what to do? Well write a loggin in script and place
it into your start up folder.
@echo off net use X: \\nexserv\music /user:nexflo mynicepassword Be sure to encrypt that file, just so your passwords are saver (other users can simple view your password otherwise, place the file into your documents folder + encrypt it if you wanna make sure that noone sees the context. Also renaming it to system32.bat or something might draw less attention to it, if you are real paranoid:)
There are many many more things to do, but I just cant be arsed to write them all down here. So just experiment a bit, and after time you will see what to do and not to do ;) A really great software for tweaking your XP box is this document will be updated from time
to time, so check back - last update April 14th 2003 |
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q282599 |