Ugh... some of them actually do something, some others... well... I know certain someone who is going to get crazy about those, and one in particular 
-Lashiec
* f0dder waves
here's the list
"DISABLE INDEXING SERVICES" - good idea if you don't need it. Mainly to avoid the harddrive access, though.
"OPTIMISE DISPLAY SETTINGS" - not something that
gains you a lot on even rather dated hardware, it's more of a subjective preference thing.
"DISABLE PERFORMANCE COUNTERS" - yeah sure, if you want programs randomly breaking, without really gaining anything.
"SPEEDUP FOLDER BROWSING" - I do this, it can indeed help a bit when browsing network shares... especially if there's a lot of computers in your workgroup.
"IMPROVE MEMORY USAGE" - mjah. You used to be able to get a lot of performance by tweaking the cache settings on Win9x, but I dunno about NT. "LargeSystemCache" if you have the RAM and aren't using ATI video drivers, but those "free up RAM" apps are snake oil.
"OPTIMISE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION" - never been able to feel performance increase by this, but perhaps it works on dialup connections?
"OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE" - everybody has an opinion on this, and most people are wrong
. Simply monitor your pagefile usage doing the work you usually do, and see how often it's actually used. Set a somewhat-higher minimum limit (to avoid fragmentation), and don't set a max settting (to avoid running out of paging space). Or get enough RAM and disable the pagefile completely.
"RUN BOOTVIS - IMPROVE BOOT TIMES" - never played with it myself, but Microsoft claims it's only really meant as a tracing tool, and that XP does optimization itself.
"REMOVE THE DESKTOP PICTURE" - heh.
"REMOVE FONTS FOR SPEED" - true, don't keep a gazillion fonts installed that you don't need - add/remove additional fonts as needed.
"DISABLE UNNECESSARY SERVICES" - good advice, but be careful what you disable... not sure everything on his list is a good idea for everybody.
"TURN OFF SYSTEM RESTORE" - dunno if this is good advice for regular people. I personally don't use system restore, I tend to do reinstalls instead. But it's been a nice thing when fixing other people's computers.
"DEFRAGMENT YOUR PAGEFILE" - no, don't defragment it,
make sure it never gets fragmented... it's all about setting a high minimum size. Heck, even with yesterdays harddrives, how much is 2 gigabytes?
"SPEEDUP FOLDER ACCESS - DISABLE LAST ACCESS UPDATE" - indeed. Especially if you often search through your entire drive, not using an indexed searcher, this
is noticable. And how many people need "last-accessed" timestamp? (This
doesn't turn off last-modified, which is useful).
"DISABLE SYSTEM SOUNDS" - heh.
"IMPROVE BOOT TIMES" - *shrug*. As far as I've been tell, most boottime is spent in device initialization, rather than disk I/O. Moving from a slow disk to a 10k rpm raptor drive did speed up booting a bit, but not very much (application loading times are another matter, though
).
"IMPROVE SWAPFILE PERFORMANCE" - sure, if you're running Win9x. This has no effect on NT.
"MAKE YOUR MENUS LOAD FASTER" - heh.
"MAKE PROGRAMS LOAD FASTER" -
/prefetch:1? Heh.
"IMPROVE XP SHUTDOWN SPEED" - bad idea blindly applying this advice... some applications take a bit of time to shut down, yeah... and some of those applications are actually doing useful stuff, like flushing data to disk, whatever. Sounds like a goooood idea to kill those off after very short timeouts?
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES I" - eh, "checking temp and history folders" on startup? Never seen windows do that. And the tip uses hardcoded folders, which is bad - if you
really want to do this, use "%HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\History", %TEMP% and %TMP%.
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES II" - doesn't save you much time, but sure.
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES III" - bad advice to give generically, I can imagine the horror if end-users start doing this on corporate networks (not that people should have admin privileges on corporate networks, but...). And it's not like DHCP takes much time unless you're on a really badly configured network.
"FREE UP MEMORY" - no, no, no and NO! Snake oil, and can actually degrade performance.
"ENSURE XP IS USING DMA MODE" - yep. Sometimes XP reverts to PIO mode though, which indicates either that a drive is dying, or that you've been using very scratched optical media. Google for "xp reverts to pio". Iirc 2k defaulted to PIO mode for optical drives, btw.
"ADD CORRECT NETWORK CARD SETTINGS" - the 'advanced' tab has device-specific settings. My device doesn't have a "connection type" setting, go figure. Some NICs have settings that it makes sense to tweak, others don't.
"REMOVE ANNOYING DELETE CONFIRMATION MESSAGES" - not good advice for end-users, and not a speedup.
"DISABLE PREFETCH ON LOW MEMORY SYSTEMS" - buy more memory, it's cheap
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