Windows XP Advanced Tweaks
A little something before we delve into the advanced XP tweaks. These tips and tweaks are strictly for people who understand this passage:
“There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
If you don’t get it, you may want to just read this to get an idea of the various tweaks that can be done to XP. Not knowing what you are doing may cause you to corrupt your system. If you have knowledge of XP and want to perform the tweaks, you need to back up your registry first.
Back Up The Registry
Backing up the registry is a safe way to ensure your system can be restored if for any reason your tweaking has caused a problem. For safety reasons, if you don’t know how to back up the registry, it is wise to take your system to someone who does know.
The tweaks below are intended for people running on NTFS, most people are. However, if you are not, do not attempt the tweaks as it can cause serious damage to your registry.
Set CPU Priority
You can add a registry entry to your system to set the priority of the CPU to focus on the foreground application no matter what. This will increase the performance of the application you are running.
Open up notepad and copy and paste the following:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl]
“Win32PrioritySeparation”=dword:00000026
Now save the file as priority_sep.reg and then right click on the file and choose to add it to the registry.
End Tasks Faster & Speed Up Menu Display
These tweaks can increase the reaction time for your menus and close down running programs faster than normally. This can increase your performance and the responsiveness of Windows.
Open up notepad and copy and paste the following:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
“ForegroundLockTimeout”=dword:00000000
“HungAppTimeout”=”4000″
“MenuShowDelay”=”200″
“WaitToKillAppTimeout”=”5000″
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]
“WaitToKillServiceTimeout”=”5000″
Now save the file as app_menu_speed.reg and then right click on the file and choose to add it to the registry.
These advanced Windows XP tweaks will have your system running better in no time. Again, if you are not familiar with the registry, you can take your system to a computer repair shop to have them make the changes for you.