The New Tweaking Bible-- literally.

G

GeForceX

Supreme [H]ardness
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Mar 19, 2003
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http://www.tweakguides.com/XPTC.html

As it was posted in the front page. I took the time to read it through, thoroughly. I think it's actually the completest "bible" I've seen yet. It has so many details for both new and old players in the enthusiast circle. However, some of you will disagree on the author's advices because I know how many of you dislike BlackViper and the services tweaks, etc. Nonetheless, check it out, bring back some feedback, point out something that may be wrong, etc. In fact, this guy (the author) wants you to tell him what he's done wrong (even though he has already "researched" it through for "three years"). Admittedly, I've only read the first fifteen pages which is not even yet into deep details for tweaking yet. But it's a good start to keep in your pockets wherever you go fixing computers. ;)

-J.
 
Along the lines of services, I find these two statements in conflict.

"The contents of this guide refer equally to both Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home. Contrary to popular belief, there is no performance difference between XP Pro and XP Home. The main differences are that XP Pro has additional features related to setting up and managing networks. The actual differences are spelt out in this Microsoft Article."

"The aim of editing your services is to prevent unnecessary programs from taking up system resources, slowing down your bootup time, conflicting with your games and applications and hindering performance in general."

Well, most of the differences are service based. If there is no performace difference between home and pro, why doesn't disabling services= better performance?

I'm still reading too, looks pretty good so far...

 
Pheonix,


I interpret the first quote to mean both Home and Pro use the same core code. I.e., you can tweak both to an identical configuration and achieve identical performance; there is nothing inherently superior in either OS version from a tweaking/performance perspective.



I interpret the second quote to mean some performance improvements can be gained, on either platform, by disabling services; purely an as-installed baseline to tweaked out comparison, not a cross-version comparison. If one version has more services enabled by default, I *presume* (based on my interpretation) the author would claim the as-installed to tweaked performance delta would be greater on that particular version.

Overall, I found the guide to be educational. I think the author got a little carried away with the services tweaking section, but that is purely personal opinion (and even I disable some of the services contained in the guide, so I can't say I completely disagree with the advice in its entirety).

I am particularly interested in hearing community feedback regarding some of the registry changes included in the guide.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Well, most of the differences are service based. If there is no performace difference between home and pro, why doesn't disabling services= better performance?
Click to expand...

Interesting thought! But I too believe he wasn't referring to services but the core of Windows. WXPPro just has extra features that enables you to add or remove them. And IIRC, testing was done before comparing the performance between WXPHome and WXPPro and neither one was really superior. Sorry, I don't remember a link but if I ever find one, will share.

-J.
 
*Still reading*

I also find it interesting that they A: present several tweaks, B: show how to test tweaks using standard tools, C: even go into baseline testing, yet D: never test a single tweak.

WTF? Take the one extra step to dispel myths and prove results of what they are recommending...

:confused:
 
I have actually read this before and discussed it with the author. The author is a really nice guy and I explained to him many of the things that were wrong and I believe he did fix some of them such as Iopagelocklimit and other registry tweaks.

He seems to think disabling services is good because "The less memory locations are occupied, the less chance for GPFs" First of all in the NT family it is not a GPF, but an access violation. Also since 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 onyl way his argument would make any sense at all was if he was talking about Win 9x where DLLs are mapped into a system-wide shared area, but this is a guide for Windows XP.

So just like any other tweaking guide some of it may be helpful, but still has a lot of false information and bad advice.

All of the following are bogus tweaks. Ignore anyone who says otherwise. This is just off the top of my head so I may have missed some. I also think all of these are in that guide.

DisablePagingExecutive
LargeSystemCache (unless you are running a dedicated file server)
IoPageLockLimit
IRQ8Priority
SecondLevelDataCache
AlwaysUnloadDll
default bandwidth reservation (QoS)
 
Nice "bible". I've followed BlackViper's tweak page for quite some time. I've seen countless arguments against disabling services and countless arguments for disabling the services. If your next game happens to be one vs. one with Fatality (Funny thing is.. he wasn't always good. He'd get spanked around in Quake 1 like crazy. Things change when you game 24/7/365) then take everything you can get. Otherwise this is more for the home user/gamer. Not the corporate user.
 
Thanks Drew. :) I made a zip where I put the "bible" in and placed your notes on which doesn't do any effect and/or is bad advice. If anyone else has valid reasons to go against his tweaks then do tell! It'll just simply inform us all and well I'm literally going to bring this "bible" to church every sunday. :p

-J.
 
Disabling services is another tweak which is not really recommended by myself and many others here too. I definitely cannnot go through th whole guide and tell you what is good advice and what is not, so I suggest not believing everything the guide says and if you do run into a tweak which sounds to you like it is bogus then you can post and I or someone else can tell yuou what it actually does.

Just like any other tweak guide there is some things that may be helpful and actually improve performance, so I am not saying ignore the whole entire guide.
 
I tend to differ with the author in his preference for optical media over hard drive media for backup purposes. IMO optical media has speed, and capacity issues, along with fragility issues that make it impractical for backups. You can certainly backup of archive certain things to optical media from time to time. But regular backups with sufficient size and capacity to accomodate large data sets or an entire drive partition often suggest hard drives or tape as a preferred backup medium.

I also consider hard drives used for backup to have a much greater MTBF than optical media. Also, the nature in which they are both handled suggests to me that there is less chance of damaging a backup hard drive over a backup DVD.

In one case I know of, someone has purchased an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure, and then anytime he sees dirt cheap drives on sale (like 60GB drives for $40) he buys a bunch of them. He then backs up a lot of his data (movies that he edits in Premier Pro mostly) to the hard drives and stores them in a firesafe at another location.

I'm not going to talk about the services idea in general, but from my point of view there are several processes that seem excessively busy and regardless of whether or not a process is running as a service or application, I always think it's worthwhile to look at more than CPU Utilization when determining a process' impact on performance. Filemon and Regmon usually compliment task manager or perfmon in determining when a process is excessively busy on a given system. Remember, I'm not talking about services specifically so put those torches and pitchforks away.
 
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