Windows XP Tips

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Windows XP is highly customizable. Microsoft took care to make a great deal of its tweaks easily accessible to users of any experience level. Experimenting with them and getting your hands dirty is the best way to find your personal sweet spot in the mix of eye candy and system performance.

Icons and Wallpaper
A tidy desktop is an efficient desktop. Your system's memory and CPU have better things to do than toy with pretty backgrounds and sort out eighty-five desktop icons. As is the case with previous versions of Windows, excessive desktop icons and desktop wallpaper take up their share of system memory, and they're constantly refreshed by the graphics subsystems. Animated desktops are particularly hard on a system's core resources.

On the other hand, the performance hit leveraged by such minor glitter is minimal, so as long as your system has more than 128MB of RAM and a semi-modern processor (something in the range of 600MHz or faster) then don't worry too much about icons and wallpaper. However, if you're limping along with 64MB of RAM on a 200MHz Pentium Pro, then every clock cycle is critical. Lose the fluff.

Cut Down on the Effects
With its smarmy new look and its GNOME-like skinning ability, Windows XP has even more eye candy than any previous version of Microsoft's operating systems. Menu transitions are animated, dialogs and mouse cursors have shadows, screen fonts are tweaked for maximum readability, and so on.

All of the visual splendor can degrade the responsiveness of the user interface. XP runs a few tests to auto-configure its GUI settings for a mix of beauty and usability, but its decisions are easily overridden. If fading menus are more annoying than eye catching, and dialog box shadows don't mean squat to you, experiment with the settings to your heart's content.

Some of the settings are accessed through the Appearance tab on the Display Properties, which you can evoke by right-clicking on an empty area of the desktop and selecting Properties. Click on the Effects button and you can tweak the menu transitions, shadows and font properties--including Microsoft's swarthy new ClearType smoothing technique, which is available in the second pull-down box. To me, it makes screen fonts look wonderful on laptop and flat-panel monitors, but I find it to be a tiny bit blurry on traditional CRT screens. Note that some people find ClearType to be less appealing on their laptops and flat panels than the standard fonts. Try it for yourself.

You can further tweak GUI performance through the System Properties tool. Open it through Control Panel or by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Properties. Choose the Advanced tab. Radio buttons let you optimize for visuals and performance, or you can customize your mix from a list of check-boxed visual effects options

Click on the Advanced tab of the Performance Options dialog and ensure that processor scheduling and memory usage are configured for programs--you'll only want to configure them for background services and caching if the PC in question is a server. This is also where you can specify the size and location of your system's paging file. Windows XP does an excellent, efficient job of managing its own paging file, and extensive testing on our part has shown no advantage in synthetic or gaming benchmarks to manually overriding XP's paging file handling.

Fast-User Switching
Available on XP Home Edition and on Professional when it's not part of a domain, fast user switching lets users of the same computer switch between accounts without logging off. It's a great feature when Mom, Dad and the twins all share the same computer, but keeping multiple user accounts active is a burden to a PC's memory usage.

When more than one user is logged on, each user's settings remain active and the programs activated through his or her account remain open--even if someone switches to another user account. Sally left Word, Excel and Barbie Fashion Designer open and Bobby comes along, switches over to his account and attempts to play Red Faction, he will notice a definite degradation in performance compared to the last time he played it when Sally wasn't logged in.

Windows XP automatically disables fast user switching during installation if the computer has 64MB of RAM or less. For best performance, make sure only one user is logged in at a time, and if that becomes a nuisance, disable the feature altogether: go to Control Panel\User Accounts, click the "Change the way users log on or off" button, and uncheck "Use Fast User Switching".

Automatic Updating
You should always keep Windows up to date with the latest security fixes, DirectX versions, compatibility patches and other updates. By default, XP will do this for you--but this requires a small program to run in the background and occasionally check, or remind you to check, for Windows revisions.

If you'd rather handle the task of updating Windows yourself, you can tell XP not to bother. Head to the Automatic Updates tab in the System Properties tool. You can elect to have Windows detect and download updates automatically, to have the OS check for updates and notify you when they are available, or not to do anything.

System Restore
System Restore is actually a very handy application that, unless you use your PC expressly for high-performance tasks like gaming, you should probably leave alone. It creates periodic snapshots of your critical system files (like the registry files, COM+ database, user profiles, and such) and stores them as a "restore point." Should you install an application that hoses your system, or if something important gets corrupted, you can revert the computer to the state it was in at a restore point and go on happily using it.

Restore points are automatically created by the System Restore service upon several events, such as when a new application is installed, a Windows update is applied, an unsigned driver is installed, or some other event occurs that could have a negative effect on the operating system. You may create manual restore points through System Restore's main interface, which you can access through Start\Programs\Accessories\System Tools\System Restore.

System Restore does require a service to run in the background that has a minimal performance impact, and its recorded backups take up hard drive space. You can control how much space it's allowed (which affects how many restore points it can create), and shut it down entirely, through the System Restore tab in the System Properties tool.

The System Restore dialog lists each active drive partition. You can adjust the percentage of space that System Restore is allowed to work with on each one. There's also a checkbox that allows you to shut down System Restore entirely for all drives.

System Restore can adversely affect application benchmark software, and might operate during active test periods, so test labs routinely disable System Restore under XP and Me before testing, and you should too when running benchmarks.

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