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Desktop platforms Toolkit

Optimising Windows XP

Greg Shultz Tech Republic

Published: 12 Oct 2004 12:50 BST

When you're troubleshooting performance problems with network-based applications running on Windows XP Professional, you'll want to begin with the settings found in the Performance Options dialog box.

These settings, which are hidden deep within Windows XP's System Properties, provide a host of options that allow you to fine-tune the operating system's overall performance and, thus, its interaction with various applications. These options allow you to adjust Windows XP's processor scheduling, memory usage, and virtual memory, as well as its use of visual effects.

In this article, I'll explore in detail how the settings in the Performance Options dialog box affect Windows XP's overall performance, and how you can boost performance by changing these settings to suit your system's needs.

Getting started
Once you've identified a performance-related problem, you can launch your troubleshooting expedition in the Performance Options dialog box. To access this dialog box, open the Control Panel and select the Performance and Maintenance category. Next, click the System icon to open the System Properties dialog box (if you're using the Control Panel's Classic view, you'll just have to click the System icon). Select the Advanced tab, and then click the Settings button in the Performance panel. You'll then see the Performance Options dialog box shown in Figure A.

As you can see, the first tab in the Performance Options dialog box is titled Visual Effects, and it's here that you can adjust almost all of Windows XP's visual features. If you click the Advanced tab, as shown in Figure B, you'll see additional settings from three categories — processor scheduling, memory usage, and virtual memory — that you can adjust to fine-tune operating system performance.

Adjusting the visual effects
As you've probably noticed, by default Windows XP enables almost all of its fancy visual effects, such as fading menus and shadows. These visual effects can take a toll on performance.