Hi, I found this in the November issue of Computer Gaming World and thought it would be of help for speeding up your gaming experience.
SPEED TWEAK WINDOWS XP
By default, Windows XP is full of clutter and not optimized for anything--hose it out and speed up your games with these tweaks. By Joel Durham
STEP #1
MURDER THE MAINTENANCE APPS. Start by choosing the System icon in the Control Panel. There are three things here to eliminate: System Restore, Automatic Updating, and Remote Assistance. Navigate to each tab, and check or uncheck the appropriate boxes and select the appropriate radio buttons to cleanse your system of these largely useless applications.
STEP #2
TOSS OUT WINDOWS MESSAGING. Ready to kill that stupid little buddy icon that nobody uses? Choose Start and Run, and type C:\Windows\Inf\SYSOC.INF. Substitute your Windows directory if necessary. This will open a text file that maliciously hides some programs from the Add/Remove Programs folder. Find the line that starts with "msmsgs=" and edit the word "hide" out of it. Save the file, open Control Panel's Add/Remove Protgrams, and click on the Windows Components button. Scroll down, and you'll find Windows Messaging just waiting to be unchecked.
STEP #3
PURGE UNNECESSARY SERVICES. Open Control Panel, select Administrative Tools, and then select Services. Here you'll see a list of things running in the backgroudn to enable certain functions of Windows XP. Some start automatically, and you don't need all of them. Turn them off by setting them to Manual; right-click on the service, choose Properties, pull down the Startup type box, and select Manual. Some functions you will turn off include Automatic Updates, Error Reporting, Indexing, Internet Connection Firewall (unless you're using it), Messenger, NVIDIA Driver Helper, Protable Media Serial Number, System Restore, and Task Scheduler.
STEP #4
REIGN IN THE SWAP FILE. XP is conservative when it first sets up the paging fileand then uses precious resources to resize it. Take that control out of Windows' hands by making your swap file huge and static. Open the Control Panel and choose System, selcet the Advanced tab, click on the Performance settings button, and go to the Advanced tab. There, you can set your own swap file size. If you have a large drive and enough free space, make it 1000 MB. Choose the Change button and make both the initial and Maximium sizes 1000 MB. Otherwise, make it as large as possible. You'll have to reboot when you're done.
STEP #5
GET RID OF STUPID STARTUP ITEMS. Finally, you can purge your system tray of silly files by hitting them where they live: in your Startup folder and "run" registry key. The easy way to do this is to use the System Configuration Utility. Launch it by hitting the Start button and then choosing Run. Type MSCONFIG. Choose the Startup tab. Uncheck anything frivoulous, like Creative Labs AudioHQ, quick launchers from Realplayer, MusicMatch, WinAmp, Kazaa, Microsoft Office; and unless you use their special functions--hardware utilities like MouseWare and Microsoft SideWinder. the beauty of System Configuration utility is that if you uncheck something and discover that part of your system doesn't work, all you ahve to do is go back in and check it again.
Hope that helps. I know it did for me.
