Recommendations on Tweaking? 1

[Guest_imported]

This is a great site! Much information provided by great helpers willing to share in harmony inside this community.
I'm a graphic artist, and I use tons of applications (corel, photoshop, etc..). My friend recommended TweakAll, Cacheman and TweakUI. I downloaded them. I want my computer to be solid fast. I have an Intel Celeron II 766mhz 128k Cache, 13 GIG HD, and 384MB of SDRAM. Can anybody give me a recommendation to what I should tweak? I want to max everything as possible, but not hurt my beautiful computer. I'm not familiar with "cacheman" linguistics! lol (jargon). What nobs should I tweak?

Sue

 

[thadwalt]

Well I know that first you should download a speed up agent like the ones you mentioned. Then when you have downloaded it should be self guided tour on what and how much to tweak stuff in your computer.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

X-teq systems Xsetup is a great way to safely tweak your system - and a lot more wide-reaching than Tweakui.

I would also recommend (as I often do!) that you set your Virtual memory to be 1.5x the amount of RAM in your PC (initial and maximum settings). Windows will complain that you're not letting it control your PC, but, after all, this is the point!

Good Luck

 

[butchrecon]

Go to

http://www.3dspotlight.com

It is an awsome tweaking site.

Another is

http://www.tweak3d.net

 

[hotfusion]

A heck of a difference in long term speed can be obtained if you have additional partitions to play with. Have you? Andy.

 

[Guest_imported]

Get Norton Utilities and run Speed Disk every week. Also run the One Click Problem Solver once in a while. These will probably do more than anything elso to speed up you machine. I also agree on reducing the size of the swap file (My Computer - Control Panel - System - Performance - Virtual Memory). Make the max and min the same number, 1.5 to 2 times your RAM, then reboot. Don't let the warning scare you, it will reboot and you'll be off and running.

 

[mrblonde]

When you up the virtual memory like that, what happens internally? Like what is windows doing different?

 

[CitrixEngineer]

If you set the Virtual memory to be the same max and min, you are stopping Windows from dynamically managing the swap file. This is a good thing for at least 2 very good reasons:

1. Wasted processor time and unnecessary slow I/O disk transfers are stopped.
2. Less likelihood of a fragmented swap file = less chances of running out of virtual memory, fewer page faults (=more Wasted processor time and unnecessary slow I/O disk transfers) and mysterious file corruption.

It is very unlikely that Windows will ever need more than twice the amount of swap file space <=> physical memory, which is why 1.5 - 2xRAM is often recommended.

 

[SSJpn]

Virtual Memory is a portion of your hard drive set aside to mimic RAM. This allows you to have more programs open on the screen than it could normally hold.

 

[spacekowboy]

settin min and max virtual memory to same number stops windows from thinking about it virtually all the time. so it frees the cpu up.

X-)

 

[hotfusion]

Run a defrag first, then set virtual mem. as above. I use a size of 100Mb and that seems to be more than enough (I have 256Mb ram). The allocated space on the disk will then stay as one lump. If poss. move virtual mem. to another partition.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

There can be issues with having less VM than physical RAM - the system maps out every process to memory at some point. If it hasn't got enough space to swap processes out to, then you may experience some disk thrashing.

Just because you've got 1Gb RAM doesn't necessarily mean you don't need a large swapfile - it may well be that you run more programs and open more documents than you would with less RAM, and therefore need the swap space.

It's a good idea to have the swap file on a separate swap partition in UNIX (in fact, it's mandatory with many flavours), but under Windows, performance will suffer if there isn't at least 2MB (I think) in the root.

However, if it all works for you, then it's not wrong