I've just splashed out on a Dell XPS, p4 3.2GHz HT
1GB PC-4200 Dual Channel DDR2 RAM
74GB 10,000 RPM HD
Radeon X800 SE PCI-Express
XP Pro

Just wondering what are the best tweaks I can do to my system to get it running at it's best


I have to say that the new Catalyst Control Centre is sweet !!

Cheers guys !!

My best advice is only install the absolute bare minimum of applications. Remember, less is always more. Only put on things you have a real reason to put on and be totally ruthless about that. That's my best tweak of all time.

Cheers Phantasm66... I always do :!:
The first thing I did was uninstall all the crap Dell pre-installed..
Whacked Firefox, Winamp, WM10, iTunes, DoomIII, MSN Messenger, PowerToys and that is it.

Only gonna put what I need on to get her in tune..
HL2, when it is out obvioulsy, and NFSU2 will have to grace it too

But I remember reading on here about tweaks that can be performed to dramatically increase performance when you have 1GB Ram

Your system likely falls under the new MRI(media reduction initiative) which meaans it may have a 3GB hidden partition that contains an image of the HDD. To check and see if it has this just look for a blue bar over the DELL screen with the www.dell.com url. If you see that then your system has that partition, you may or may not have received discs for your OS and apps, if you did, good, if you didn't, call Tech Support and request them. While the new PC Restore feature is nice from a support perspective because it reimages the HDD to new condition in under 8mins, it can be annoying as well. First, it takes up 3GB of space you could be using(not a big deal to most) second, you cannot run most recovery console commands because any modification to the MBR will cause PC Restore not to work.

PC Restore is based on Norton Ghost and is part of Dell's MRI program. In mid July Dell started shipping systems with PC Restore, last week they started shipping systems with no CDs, though you can still request the discs from Tech Support and they will give them to you. You can also request them at the time of order. Tech support will also walk you through recovering the hidden partition and removing PC Restore if you request it, you can also find this info on dell's support site.

As far as actual tweaks, I'd suggest you check out XP tweak guides such as the one at TS as well as the sites in my sig. The registry guide is a goldmine of speed and performance tweaks if you are willing to use them. There are registry hacks that can improve performance with over 512mb RAM. One of them will force the system to load the kernel to RAM instead of the PF, another is setting the PF to a lower size than the amount of RAM unless otherwise needed with copious amounts of RAM because it will slow down paging. Most people with large amounts of RAM only need the pagefile for apps which use it for temp storage(some image editors and graphics apps)