Windows XP Tweaking Guide

[KoolDrew]

Re: Windows XP Tweaking Guide

You see, the irony is that another well-known tweaker (Tweakhound) will tell you that AlwaysUnloadDLL does nothing. In fact he and I debated this on ABXZone and he insisted that he had tested it and it did nothing. So you can see what I mean about "subjective" - some people, even those who are supposed to be quite knowledgeable on XP, will each say something different about certain tweaks. Who can the average user believe? It would be great if Microsoft came out and cleared everything up about XP tweaking, but so far they haven't done so.

What exactly do you mean he tested it and it did nothing? As I already said Windows XP does look at the registry key, but it will do nothing for performance at all.

What I mean is precisely what I explained earlier - errors like General Protection Faults occur because a game (typically Unreal-based games are major culprits in this regard) will attempt to read/write to a protected memory area and the result is a crash to the Desktop and a "General Protection Fault".

In the NT family it is not a GPF, but an access violation.

The less memory locations are occupied, the less chance for GPFs

This is completely wrong. Each seperate process lives in its own seperate adress space. The more processes on a system do not increase chances for access violations.

Also an acess violation does not occur from trying to acess an occupied memory location. Ussually it results from attempting to acess unallocated adress space.

The less programs are resident in memory, the less chance for critical conflicts which lead to crashes and/or sudden reboots.

Again they do not sahre eachothers adress space so they do not "conflict" with each other. They also are not "resident in memory"

The only way what you are saying would be valid is if you are talking about 9x since on 9x DLLs are mapped into a system-wide shared area. Since we are talking about Windows XP here what you are saying is completely wrong.

That's how I and all the other so-called tweakers learned our stuff, so if you're interested in getting the most of your machine, spend some time under the hood.

A lot of those so-called tweakers give out false information. Some tweakers even think Virtual memory is the same as the pagefile.

theres no way i can accept wxp's default settings, they're for the user who wants it most pretty and smooth. I want speed, therefore i tweak UI. i want security and stability, therefore i tweak more.

There is nothing wrong with tweaking if you know what you are doing. IT is just there are thousands of guides out there and each one has its handful of false information and some have just really terrible advice (disable pagefile). Tweaking CAN result in better performance by turning off visual effects etc, since the OS has less to do, but it can also result problems or sluggish performance. That is why i suggest if you ae going to mess around with tweaking at least know what everything does. This is really hard though with the false information on the net. Even a popular site called howstuffworks wh8ich I visit often says the pagefile is the same as Virtual Memory. There are also barely any sites that say Iopagelocklimit is not a valid tweak in Windows XP. Even TweakXP which us very popular has alot of tweaks where there descriptions are wrong. It is bad enough they are suggesting to use the tweak, but then they give it the wrong description? This makes it really hard for anyne to actually know what stuff does.