Put Defrag on Your To Do List
NT Workstation disks get fragmented under heavy use. Defragging regularly-at least once a week-with a third-party tool such as Executive Software's Diskkeeper can boost performance considerably.
Turn Over a New Page
If your workstation gets powered on and off at least once a day, clearing the page file allows NT's disk-swap space to be re-created fresh each time. This might speed things up a bit. Edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control \Session Manager\Memory Management, changing the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value to 1 to enable page-file clearing.
Put Page File on a Speedy Drive
If you have more than one hard disk, you should put your page file either at the start or end of the fastest disk-preferably in its own partition.
SCSI, not IDE
Go with SCSI interfaces for disk drives on NT. SCSI has a greater effect on an NT system than on a Win9x system, and usually taxes the CPU less than even the super-fast Ultra DMA controllers.
Clean Start with NTFS
Don't convert older FAT drives with lots of constantly used data directly to NTFS. Copy the data off and reformat the drive as NTFS. This creates "clean" NTFS directory structures at the front of the disk.
Lurking in the Shadows...
Because NT's Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) does all the talking to the hardware, NT doesn't use ROM shadows of video or controller memory. Enabling them (in your system's BIOS) just wastes space.
Boot an Old Video BIOS
An older video BIOS can cause problems with NT. Check to make sure you're using the most recent NT drivers, as well as the most recent flash BIOS for your video card.
Check Your Write Posting
Many Pentium Pro motherboards have a bug in the chipset that causes a crash when the board uses PCI write posting, a data-acceleration technique. When write posting is off, NT performance degrades considerably. A program such as Mentisworks' SysEnhance (http://www.sysenhance.com) will indicate if your machine has write posting enabled or not.
Preventive Maintenance
Maintain your hard drive by performing these steps at least monthly, in this order:
- Delete all files and folders with dates older than one week from C:\WINDOWS\TEMP.
- Purge your browser's history and Internet cache files.
- Run ScanDisk. Select the Standard radio button and enable Automatically Fix Errors. Click on Advanced and, under Log File, pick Replace Log; for Cross-Linked Files, select Delete; click Free under Lost File Fragments; under Check Files For, check "Invalid dates and times;" and disable "Check host drive first, " unless you've compressed your hard drive.
- Empty the Recycle Bin.
Speed Up Program Launching
Your PC's processor, while important, isn't always given the time it needs to execute tasks. Power users might consider maximizing the CPU's priority. Open the system Registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ VxD \ BIOS. In the rightmost pane, create a new DWORD value and label it: "CPUPriority" (without quotes.) Double-click the newly created setting, switch its format to Decimal, then enter "1" (without quotes) as a value. Upon reboot, this tweak should speed up the launching of programs. NOTE: your mileage may vary. |
