Additional Optimization guide tips

These are additional tips to supplement the Quickfire speedup guide.
Please note that tips that are XP-only are indicated with (XP).
Also, there are few, if any, optimisations, in existance, for general usage which do not apply equally to DAWs (digital audio workstations), graphics workstations and other computers in specialised scenarios. I have listed a few specialised tips for audio workstation users here, but these are the minority.

Easy Stuff

(XP) If you don't have Service Pack 3 already installed, install it. Some people will, of course, disagree with me here- but as long as you've got the firewire fix installed it's much better - one hell of a lot more secure too - plus there are significant performance increases in some areas with SP3. Note that SP3 causes problems with some wireless adaptors, particularly on notebooks, so if you're running wireless, you need to check with the manufacturer or their website to see if the drivers specifically support SP3.
Backup old projects and data on CD/DVD/External hard drive and delete from HD. The less files you have, the less time the drive spends searching through the file system. And less clutter of course, so you can focus on what's new.
If you're using Internet Explorer, change to Firefox or Opera, or Chrome (all are more secure, less-resource-heavy and faster).
If you're using Outlook or Outlook Express, change to Thunderbird or Eudora (both are more secure, better spam-filtering).
If you're using Windows Media Player, change to VLC and/or Media Player Classic (both are faster with less bloat). Remove Windows Media Player, cause it steals associations periodically (for XP, follow my method or buy XPlite. In Vista/Win7, remove using control panel -> programs and features -> turn on/off features). If using Media Player Classic, the Windows Media Codecs themselves can in fact be installed separately, without installing WMP, via Windows Media Lite.
If you're using Quicktime or Realplayer, uninstall, then replace with VLC or alternatively with both QuicktimeAlternative and RealAlternative (all of these programs are faster, with less bloat).

Slightly more advanced stuff

If still using IDE (PATA) drives, turn on UDMA66 (Ultra DMA) support. By default XP/Vista/Win7 disable UDMA66/100 support for PATA/IDE drives, limiting the speed to the lesser UDMA33 standard. I don't know why this is, and Microsoft does not explain why on their guide on how to turn it on, save to say that this is by design. I don't know what the setting is by default in Vista.
MDGx's guide on how to turn it back on is the most accurate one (see further down his page). Please note that unless you're using ATA66 cables and both drives on any given channel are UDMA66-capable, this setting won't have any effect on your system.
Virtual memory: Turning off pagefiles, even if you have a large amount of ram, is typically detrimental to your system's performance (more information: 1/3rd of the way down this page). Also, some apps won't run (eg. photoshop 6.*) without one.
Putting the pagefile on a drive other than the drive that your system partition is on, is ideal (separate partitions on the same disk will not make a significant difference), as most of the time data is being transferred from the system drive and into the pagefile.
(XP) Make sure disk performance counters are disabled (a server feature that is useless on desktop machines) by going Start->run and typing "diskperf -n".
(XP) If you have the money, download XPlite from www.98lite.net and remove IE, Windows Media Player, Outlook Express and anything else you don't need.
If you don't, Nlite is an even better option (see "Misc stuff", below), but of course requires re-installation of the operating system, from scratch.
Go through your directories and delete any miscellaneous files you've created and left lying around.

Networking stuff

Go Control panel->Network Connections and right-click the specific network you want to alter, click properties. Click the network device "Configure" on the right. Go to the 'advanced' tab. Here you can edit and alter settings to do with your network adaptor. These are specific to your particular ethernet adaptor, so cannot be entirely generalised. However, generally some will reduce CPU load by using the adaptors own internal chipset (any 'offload' options), and some can drastically alter your network performance (jumbo frames, interrupt moderation rate, etc). Look up the various settings on the net and see whether the defaults are what they need to be, then alter accordingly.
Download TCP/IP optimizer from SpeedGuide.net, run and set the settings to "Optimal" for each of your network adaptors. This will enable and change window's settings for that specific network connection, resulting in, in some cases, major increases in thoroughput and overall speed. I have found that changing the values to anything greater than the settings for 2500Kbps does not result in any speed increase - for my two gigabit networks.
NOTE: TCP/IP connections may sometimes benefit from creating static IP's, in the case of internal networks rather than internet connection networks, however this is more of a trouble-shooting tip than an optimisation.

Misc Stuff

I don't recommend defragmenting your drive (or doing registry cleans) more than once every three months. More often than that is certainly a waste of time in the vast, vast majority of cases. Personally I recommend defragmenting every six months to most users. Maybe if you're doing a lot of shifting around of files or reinstallation of operating systems etc etc then maybe you will get additional benefit from defragmenting every month or so, but this would be a special-case. Note: The NTFS file system is not as heavily affected by defragmentation as FAT32 file systems are. FAT32 file systems also take longer to defragment.
Processor scheduling: there are a lot of sites which will tell you to set this to background services for audio applications and other specialised activities - I can't say I recommend this at all, except on a per-user basis. If you find your particular program that you use most of the time performs better/more reliably then go for it - otherwise, leave it alone. I've seen no evidence of performance increase with it changed to background services for any activity.
If you're installing XP from scratch I heartily recommend creating an Nlite'd version of your XP installation disc (you will need a running windows installation with Microsoft .NET 2 installed to run Nlite, as well as your Windows XP disc, the "Network" (full) Installation version of Windows XP service pack 3, and the Post-SP3 update pack).
Firstly, this enables you to configure everything the way you like it in the base install without having to do it in a gazillion different locations within windows later on. Secondly you can strip all the irrelevant stuff you don't use out safely.
And thirdly you can integrate (slipstream) service pack 3 and the update pack above into the installation so that you're not stuck with lots of redundant dlls on your HD later on.
Example: my previous (non-nlite) XP installation was 1.3GB for just the windows folder, with SP3 installed and all service pack uninstallation directories removed. By contrast, my current nlite'd xp install with service pack 3 integrated created only a 512MB windows folder, total.
So there's a considerable difference right there.
There are more pages on the web than I can count on how to optimise an Nlite installation, so just use google it if you're worried.
Here's a couple of the configs for my regular installations to get you started:
Mega-stripped
Slightly-stripped
ps. The version of nLite for Vista is called 'vLite', and another company has just released an equivalent product for Windows 7, called '7lite'.

Drive and Partitioning Stuff (for experts)

About windows file systems:

FAT (FAT8 or FAT16) is the fastest for less than 2000 files, yet also has the most limitations. Maximum partition size is approximately 2GB.
FAT32 is slightly faster than NTFS for less than 2000 files, can't store files > 4GB and you have to defrag it often. Maximum partition size is approximately 500GB - the XP partitioning tool is artificially crippled to only allow the creation of FAT32 partitions when the maximum size is 32GB, but external partitioning tools and previous windows versions can create FAT32 partitions at their real maximum size, and XP will work fine with them.
NTFS is slightly more secure, does not fragment quite as much as FAT32 but is slightly slower on most PC's when the number of files on a partition is less than 2000. On systems with massive amounts of files (example: file servers, network drives, web servers, sample/audio partitions)) I would recommend NTFS - this has to do with the algorithms NTFS uses for locating files, which are more scalable than FAT's method. I would estimate the performance difference to be about 5% (FAT32 > NTFS for low number of files, NTFS > FAT32 for large amount of files) of overall disc performance (not of total system performance, of course). Maximum partition size is huge (many terabytes).
NTFS's file allocation mechanism is grossly wasteful - it reserves at least 10% of the drive for the Master file allocation table, though it will give up this space to other files when the parition runs low on space. Therefore, for partitions which are solely storing singular files (pagefile or partition backup files) or infrequently-used data (program installers etc) it would not be the first choice.

About drive controllers, disk access and partitions

Disk access is usually ~35% faster at the start of a hard drive than it is at the end. Hard drives read from the outside of a disc to the inside, but as the outer rings rotate same speed as inner rings, but have greater circumference, they therefore yield more data per rotation, hence a better transfer speed and access times!
Copying data between drives is far faster than copying data to the same drive, as drives cannot read and write from a disc at the same time.
Copying data between drives on separate drive controllers can be even faster, given that there is a limited amount of actions that can be happening at once on a single drive channel. However, some drive controllers perform better than others, so use your discretion.
Most onboard drive controllers use the system CPU for some calculations. However some are faster than others, and use less CPU. You can find out which is faster/more-cpu-intense using benchmarking apps like HDTune free. The most common (currently) motherboard drive controller is the Intel ICHxR (where 'x' is the version number). The ICH is light on CPU for basic operation, heavier for RAID work.
RAID - all you need to know is: Raid 0 is fast but insecure, Raid 1 is normal speed (read speed can be faster than normal, but this depends on the particular RAID controller and scenario) but more secure than a single drive, Raid 5 is fast for reading but slow for writing and no longer reasonably secure in the days of 1TB drives (ditto RAID 6 in 10 years time), Raid 1+0 is the best all-round but uses the most drives (and is therefore the most expensive) - Raid 0+1 is slghtly less secure than 1+0 (same speed).
Ideally you want a RAID card which uses it's own chips rather than the CPU for it's operations, as some RAID activity can be processor-intensive (up to 9% CPU on a 4ghz dual-core). Typically the better RAID cards are the more expensive ones. Detailed info on RAID can be found all over the net - so just use google.

Partitioning tips:

Make your system partition small (6GB is typically enough) and have it at the start of your fastest drive (e.g a 10krpm drive is good). Only use it to store your operating system and programs. Move your 'My documents' and other 'special folders' to another drive using Tweakui from Microsoft (My computer tree/special folders).
Put your least-used data (e.g program installers, backups) on partitions at the end of drives. This ensures that the faster data areas get used by the more frequently-used data.
Change your system partition to 32kb or 64kb clusters NTFS, and your data partitions as 32kb clusters (FAT32 or NTFS). From my tests I can say this improved performance - on my system at least. If you're using an SSD drive, this becomes less relevant. If you can't repartition your drives, a more expensive partitioning app can change often the cluster sizes without deleting the partitions.
If you can, make a partition dedicated solely to the windows pagefile (virtual memory file) at the beginning of a disk which isn't the same disk that the system partition is stored on. It doesn't need to be any larger than the pagefile itself.
Format it as FAT32 with 4kb cluster size - it doesn't need the extra security of NTFS, needs all the speed it can get, and 4kb is the default windows memory page size, which makes writes a little more efficient.
I generally don't recommend multi-booting to different installs of XP/Vista for different tasks - the performance difference is nil if you've set up your installation correctly, but the overhead of rebooting every time you want to do something different is huge, and a big time-waste. Not to mention losing twice as much space as well as having to build and maintain two separate installations. You're better off with one customised installation which works well as a whole, than two or more customised installs.
Using this information, make up your own mind about which file system(s) you feel you should use for each drive, and format/repartition according (warning for neophytes: formatting deletes all data on a drive - don't do it unless you know exactly what you're doing). You can essentially have as many partitions per drive as you want, but four or fewer primary partitions is ideal from a data recovery point-of-view (in case of accidents).
Good free partitioning software comes and goes (typically the really good stuff becomes payware, e.g BootIt NG), so just google to find current partitioning freeware.
(XP) If you're buying a new hard drive, most of the time nowadays it's going to be "Advanced format" ie. 4k sectors. This means you need to make sure all your partitions are aligned on 4k boundaries, since XP doesn't do this by default (Vista and Win7 do). To align your partitions, find out the brand of the drive you've bought and go to their website. All the major brands have alignment tools specifically for their drives.
If you're running a digital audio workstation (DAW) - then take a look at my brief but informative partitioning for DAW's guide.

Hardware Stuff

A system optimised using all the directives above will not require more than 512MB of RAM to run well, under XP at least, and will not benefit from more than 1GB of RAM unless you have specific applications or plugins (eg. samplers, computer games) which require or benefit from more ram.
Regardless of how much ram you have, the above directives (particularly disabling specific services) will free up more of your existing memory.
More than 3GB of ram on a 32-bit system is often a partial waste of money. Please read my extensive guide to Operating systems, the 3GB memory barrier and the various OS memory limitations here for more details. By default, XP is set up so that applications cannot access more than 2GB of memory. You can change this by inserting the /3GB option into your c:\BOOT.INI file. Only do this if you have more than 2GB of *available* RAM at boot (run the task manager by pressing ctrl-alt-delete, look under the performance tab for available ram). Please see the notes above about editing the boot.ini file. The line you need to alter will look something like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /execute
Just add "/3gb" to the end of the line, like so:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /execute /3gb
Done.
Only do this if you have applications which may benefit from more than 2GB of ram.
NOTE: On some systems, particularly where the installation has not been optimised or a video card with a large amount of memory (> 256mb) is used, using the /3GB can create system problems due to the OS limiting it's memory usage to 1GB. If you experience problems after enabling the /3GB switch, please disable it.
However, many 32-bit applications are not, by default, able to access more than 2GB of memory (virtual or physical). This can, however be addressed by using the freeware laatido tool to patch executables and dlls to be large-address-aware (access more than 2gb of memory).
Contrary to what many musicians seem to think, no one motherboard manufacturer is necessarily better than the other. It comes more down to the class of board you buy - Asus, Gigabyte and most of the others have entry-level boards, middle-range boards and server-class boards, as well as a range of other types. Not only that, but middle-range boards are not necessarily worse or less stable than server-class boards (though typically they will be). It pays to know your specifications well and to know what you're looking for in terms of features, what the best chipsets are and so on and suchforth. Motherboard "roundup" reviews can be helpful for initial selection. Having said that, if you're not overclocking or worried about a lack of features, Intel boards are typically the most stable and have the best warranties of all motherboard manufacturers. And avoid foxconn if you can ;) ..
10krpm hard drives are of course great, but many 7200rpm drives come close in terms of overall rate-of-transfer performance nowadays, if not in terms of actual seek times. Look up recent drive roundups on google to see what's best recently.
Your power supply (PSU) is important. More important than you think. A cheap one is fine for household machines, but not for power-hungry daw or gaming setups. Most cheap power supplies fail at even 80% total loading e.g See this video (yeah, it's corsair, a PSU manufacturer - but other people have done similar tests with the same results).
The guide here will tell you how much power you need for your system *on average* (you want to double the wattage and buy a PSU with *roughly* that wattage, preferably), but ultimately it's the brand and quality of the PSU that's more important than the power rating. A good mid-range 400w Coolermaster, Corsair or Thermaltake (for example) PSU is generally going to be far better than a 500w no-name brand, when it comes to system stability and actual *genuine* power delivery. For whatever PSU you're looking at buying, it helps to look for technical reviews online to see whether there's any problems with it.

Additional Information

All advice given without guarantee - use your brain - if anything dies/fries/stops/explodes, see a doctor (but don't talk to me).
Having said that, my contact email can be found here. If you think I've got something wrong you're welcome to tell me-
M@

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