Tweaking
your System Memory
Last
Updated on September 26, 2000 by Thomas
McGuire - Page 2/8
Hard
drive setup
As
you may know, the Swapfile exists on your hard drive, which
is much slower than using RAM. So speeding up your hard
drive can improve Swapfile performance a lot. Although more
RAM is highly recommended, having a faster hard drive will
suffice. First off run Scandisk to fix any errors on
the hard drive.
System
Properties contains some important settings which can be
used to improve hard drive performance, or simply for
troubleshooting purposes.
Right
click on My Computer,
select Properties.
Select the Performance
tab. Now hit the File
system button. Go to the Troubleshooting
tab. Some of these definitions were obtained via the MS
Knowledge Base, although only the important ones are
covered here.
Disable
new file sharing & locking semantics. This setting
controls file-locking mechanisms in Windows. Tick (Disabled)
this setting if you are currently experiencing problems with
some programs, although this should be seen as a last
resort, your system will perform optimally with this setting
Unticked (Enabled).
Disable
synchronous buffer commits. This setting manages the
function calls to the File-Commit API to return immediately
without checking to see if the data was correctly written to
the drive. By default, Windows uses synchronous
buffer commits. You can change this setting to enable
asynchronous buffer commits for programs that may need this
functionality.
Disable
write-behind caching for all drives. When enabled
(Unticked), your
computer sends an enable-write-cache command to the hard
disk activating the hard disk write-back cache, & if you
disable (Tick)
this feature, the hard disk write-back cache is deactivated.
When enabled disk
I/O performance may improve, although if you experience
system failure e.g. Power loss, you could experience
drive/file corruption. I'd recommend leaving this Unticked
unless your system is prone to bad shutdowns/power failure.
Disable
System Restore
(Windows Millennium only). Ticking this setting will semi-disable
Windows Millennium’s system restore capability. I say semi
as it still replaces/rebuilds some files, e.g. autoexec.bat.
Although the benefit of Ticking this setting is that
it will lessen the amount of hard drive accessing caused by
System Restore. Leave this setting Unticked to fully-enable
System Restore features. This may reduce system performance
slightly as a result of the extra hard drive usage.
Go
to next page !
|
