Welcome to part 4 of "Tweaking the crap out of Windows XP". This is more hardware based... Also,

I'll be covering some BIOS tweaks...

BIOS:

Your BIOS has some settings that can REALLY slow down your performance. I'm only going to cover some of the more basic ones:

AGP: There should be a setting to change your AGP "X" rating (put it up to the highest your board can go. Some of the 4X boards come at 2X as 2X is more compatible with a lot of things) and aperature size. I recently read that the more you REDUCE the aperature size on a high-end card... the better it performs. at "256", I got jerky performance, at "4" I had the same issue. "16" on the other hand, worked pretty dang well. Just so ya know, that's a Gainward 128 meg 8X AGP card in a 4X MSI 845PE board.

QUICK BOOT: Have this puppy enabled... I'd also kill that stupid splash screen. Ya can't see what's going on with that a huge screen that reads "COMPAQ", "MSI" or "PENTIUM INSIDE". Watch yer BIOS and you'll be able to figure out how to lower your times, just 'cause you'll see it.

BOOT SEQUENCE: If ya wanna decrease boot time... change the sequence from "A:, CD-ROM, IDE" to "IDE, CD-ROM, A:". This will decrease boot time 'cause it won't waste time looking for boot records from A: (a slow drive if ever there was one), and the CD-RM.

INTEGRATED PERIPHERALS: Turn off anythin' yer not usin'... it frees up resources. Also, Windows won't go looking for somethin' yer not going to use anytime soon.

VIDEO BIOS SHADOWING: Turn it off unless you use DOS a helluva lot.

Video BIOS Cacheable: Disable.

USB Controller: Disabled, you free up an IRQ. Enabled you keep yer USB... tough choice

SERIAL Controller: Disabled, you free up an IRQ... Enabled... you'll probably never use it unless you have a lot of old stuff layin' around or you have some business or Palm Pilot
attachments.

HARDWARE OVERVIEW:

HARD DRIVES:

Hard-drives can be a bottleneck, and you may not even think it's a problem. If you have SATA (Serial ATA) drives, please skip down to the next category. nder ideal conditions. Your hard-drive should stand alone as a master (jumper settings). There is more than one kind of master for some drives though...

MASTER WITHOUT SLAVE: This is the best setting if you only this one drive on your IDE chain.

MASTER WITH SLAVE: Having one drive with this setting can cause issues you never really think about. This can cause some confusion in your BIOS when loading, and can limit your hard-drive's potential.

SLAVED HARD-DRIVE:

When slaving a hard-drive to another hard-drive, you should make sure that BOTH drives share the same speed. You will experience reduced performance, and/or stability issues by mixing drives of various speeds. If ya got a 5400 RPM drive, adding a 7200 drive isn't going to speed you up...

If you have a 7200 RPM drive, adding a 5400 drive will SLOW DOWN the 7200 drive!

SLAVED DEVICES:

I usually don't suggest mix and matching your hard-drives with anything. Slaving your hard-drive to a device reduces it's over-all performance. Still, if you have 4 devices and only two IDE
channels (supporting 2 devices each)... it doesn't leave you a lot of options.

Unless you want to spring for an ATA Controller... a PCI board that is fairly inexpensive that will allow you to free up your hard-drive... The ATA Controller will allow you to have four devices as "Masters", thus each will run at optimum performance (depending on WHICH ATA controller you have, anyway).

VIDEO CARDS

Video cards usually come with software that allows you to tweak the CRAP out of them. Both my Leadtek ti-200 GeForce 3 card and my Gainward Ti-4200 came with software that looks like a car's tachometer. This allows you to tweak your card for performance. I would suggest keeping it the extreme edge of the "Green" zone. Yellow and Red are for those with extreme cooling for their

GPU (like with water). OVER Over-clocking can burn your card, cause instability, and make your life unpleasant. I keep mine at the edge of green, and I don't have issues, and I'm still pretty
pleased with my performance.

MONITOR SPEED:

Right click in the middle of your desktop (or where-ever their isn't an icon). select "properties"... it'll take you to your display settings. Go to "Settings", "Advanced", and the "Monitor" Button.

Everytime I reload my rig... I always forget to reset my damn monitor settings from the default "60 Hertz" to "85 Hertz". My monitor will go up to 100hz, but I usually keep it at about 85.. I
read somewhere that usin' the max on your monitor decreases it's lifespan. Usually, 75 Hertz is sufficient for most things. Some programs will choke if the refresh rate on
your monitor isn't at LEAST 70 Hertz or better.

VIDEO CARD TWEAKING:

DRIVERS: The most important aspect of squeezing as MUCH speed as you can out of your video card is the drivers.

DIRECT X:

Try to get the latest TESTED version of Direct X. If you want to know what version you have, hit

"Start", "Run", "dxdiag". It'll tell you what version at the very bottom of the summary. As I hear, we can expect Direct X 10.0 here fairly soon...

FSB OVERCLOCKING (Front Side Bus)

Basically, the easiest way to overclock your system without trying to get fancy is to just OC your FSB. Also, if you want to get deeper into Overclocking your CPU, you can go for Vcore
voltage and Clock-speed. By tweaking my rig, I've upped both m VCore and FSB. I'm running a 1.5 Gigahertz P4 at 1.6 Ghz. Only 100 megabytes... but I've taken this 1.5 Ghz proc up to 1.8 Ghz
with water cooling (it rocked)... If you try tweaking the Vcore on some motherboards, you might have the machine not do a damn thing when you go to power up... best thing to do at this point is read up on where to reset your BIOS jumper... then try again.

Overclocking WILL void your warranty (when you overclock your processor, it forces more energy through it, and the company in question will know you've done it (A lot of the OEMs will NOT
include overclocking options in the BIOS) If you're not paying attention, can break your heart if it overheats and blows both the processor and board. I like overclocking mostly for getting a
little more performance from my rig than the factory says I should... and for the bragging rights.

And I'd say for the 3d/pcMark scores, but the 3DMark 2003 has been kind of a disappointment to m...

In this day and age, if you're not using the full capabilities of your motherboard for the full, allowable processor it says it will run... it's probably only a matter of time before you upgrade anyway. Still... if you burn both your processor and motherboard, you're going to be one sad little pimp... so be careful!

MOTHERBOARD: Make sure yer BIOS is current and your chipset driver is up to date.

RAM: High Performance RAM overclocks better, is more stable, and offers more stable power.

OTHER NOTES:


BRAND NAME: Let's face it... Brand "X" isn't gonna give you high performance... most OEMs use Brand X for their boards... and as your motherboard is what everything pretty well connects through, going cheap is almost a sin in the realms of performance tweaking.

I know this is kind of a short bit of hardware tweaking, but if you cover these, you should see enough of a performance boost without me having to go into a brand-by-brand comparisons and configurations...

Tweaking the Crap out of Windows XP Part 5 is something I'll be doing later as more of a generalized "How to change a bunch of stuff" kind of thing. This is kind of it for performance tweaking for now. I know there will be more later, and I know there is more that could probably be mentioned... but this should be an excellent start to getting Windows XP's dogged-ass in gear.

Hope all this has helped... it's been fun to put together (I was going to go REALLY in-depth with SFC disabling, Window system file altering and some other stuff... but I got too much crap I don't wanna reload right now!)

Peace out!

-DarkSamurai