Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

Scott,

What do you think of the NTFS tweaks such as disabling the Last Access Timestamp and preventing the creation of short filenames? The article at the following URL includes these (and other) tweaks: http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/w ... Hacks.html

Interesting, yes I agree on the 8.3 short naming tweak. I leave this enabled but do turn off the last timestamp flagging. I've never heard of that last file naming tweak you mention. That is yet another great tip.

The desire to speed up the computer. As long as this does not effect the other two S's that is understandable (Stability, Security).

There are OS tweaks that WILL noticeably speed up your system. [few and far between, but worth knowing]

And the many tweaks that will speed up your system from the computers perspective, but not yours. The question is can slinging enough of these together -- without either disabling things you find useful or tweak others that combined actually degrade performance -- to add up to a noticeable speed improvement by you?

As Scott has noted elsewhere, a week later after "seeing" an improvement will it feel like it is still there? This is the bane of performance tweakers --- so welcome to the club.

A good starting place for your jump into such tweaking lies in three publications:

by Curt Simmons (Wiley), by Maximum PC (Que) and . In addition there are several "XP hack" books that cover this area. Enjoy.

When you get done many, many months from now, I think you will agree all the unstable, slow crawling and non-functioning operating systems you mangled were well worth it. You learned the most important central lesson an auto mechanic learns over the years of tweaking his car on the weekends: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Scott,

what tweaks and adjustments would you recommend for an XP system destined for a "regular" (i.e. someone not particularly computer savvy who just uses their PC to write documents, surf the web and email) user. I am going to be clean installing XP Home on their new Dell Laptop that currently has Vista.

Also curious if you think that turning off the NTFS timestamp would affect defrag or windows "self tuning" at all?

Thanks!

Search my posts on this forum for other recommended tweaks, mainly in the Tips and Windows sections. I'll add more as I'm able. Until then, a good rule is when in doubt, leave it alone. <g>

Having a clean and well running system is more about what you install (or better yet, DON'T install) in addition to Windows. I for one am very conservative in what I'll allow on any of my systems. I use a spare system (or Virtual PC) for general software abuse and testing purposes. Scott.

PS: While I've not seen any demonstrable performance benefit, turning off the last access timestamp update doesn't cause any problems I am aware of...

For me the less tracking the better. Scott.