v1.2<-- please note the version number. v1.00 was when I posted it and I have revised and added some more things in a few sections.

I have broken this guide into 6 parts. Networking, file system, memory performance, freeing up memory, startup/shutdown and then the other stuff. I've tried to pack as much performance related tweaking here as I can but there's always more to be uncovered. I will update this article as frequently as possible. I know there's a million tweaks that I'm missing here but I am trying to keep this guide dedicated to tweaks that directly affect your performance. I'll put together a second guide about the annoyances and other things but keep in mind this is ONLY performance stuff. If you know of something that affects the performance quite a bit and it's not listed here please post a thread in our Windows forum.

We of course have to spotlight Enemy_Of_Evil and http://www.mods4me.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=45 for the basis of this article

There's a LOT of potential damage that can be done with the data within this article. You will have to understand the risks. You could potentially cause your system to quit booting and many other things. You will want to make a backup of anything important just in case. Please move on if you understand that and are willing to risk things.

What are the tools of the trade?

Notepad - With this baby you can get out of having to spend much time in regedit ;) What you will want to do is create a file call tweaks.reg on your desktop. After that files has been created right click on it and select edit. Next paste what I have in italics into that file. You will have to read what I have said about each tweak and you'll have to change some of them according to your system.

Regedit - Knowing how to use it to edit your registry is a MUST for this guide. It is the only tool that we're using here.

To run it you will have to click on the start menu and select run. From there you type regedit. From there you can browse around and find all kinds of things to change/edit. If you're new to this make sure you look but NOT touch. Make sure that you make a backup before you touch anything. To do this you click on File and then export. Save the registry file someplace safe and if your screw something up you will have to return to regedit and either fix your changes or import the old file. I suggest you reboot after every line that you change since you'll have to restart windows in order for the changes to take affect. You don't want to do too many edits at a time. This will slowly help you safely tweak things out.

Basically browsing the registry is setup just like browsing folders in windows explorer. When I say something like "the key you need to edit can be found here HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft" you will click on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder and then look for the Software folder and then the Microsoft folder and the key you either have to add or edit will be in there. I will tell you very specific keys to add or edit. You will see the keys within that folder in the right side box. Right Click on them to see what all you can do with them.

Alot of these tweaks can be done in Cache man and Tweak XP? but what kind of a guide would this be if I only pointed you to software?