File System

Your drives are the biggest bottleneck in your system and there's a few things that you can do to greatly improve the performance of them. If your main use for your computer is running applications all day long this is of course a MUST! Surprisingly the biggest things that slow NTFS down are "features".

Turn off indexing

The newer version of NTFS introduces some new "features" One of these is a file indexing thing that enables you to search for files and also text within files very quickly. How is this done? Well... every time you add a file it is logged into a DB that can eat away at your drive space rather quickly and slows you down while doing so. I would suggest everybody turn this off because I don't know of anybody who does enough searches on their drives to sacrifice as many resources as this does.

1. Browse to your hard drive either through Windows Explorer or through my computer
2. Right click your hard drive icon and select properties.
3. At the bottom of this window you'll see "Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches," turn this feature off for all of your drives by unchecking the box and clicking ok..
4. After that a window will appear and you'll want to choose apply to all folders and subfolders if you want the full benefit. You could turn this on for selective folders that you search frequently. For the most part you want this off for all of your folders.

CDFS tweaks

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\CDFS

Look for that registry key, if not there, we must create a new key, then add the following values

CacheSize, this must be added as a binary value, then type in this value: ff ff 00 00
Prefetch, this key must be added as a DWORD value, then type in this value: 4000 hex
PrefetchTail, this key must be added as a DWORD value, then type in this value: 4000 hex

Or in your *.reg file...[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\CDFS]
"CacheSize"=hex:ac,09,00,00
"Prefetch"=dword:00004000
"PrefetchTail"=dword:00004000

Convert Fat 32 to NTFS

I won't bore you with the details about the differences between NTFS and Fat32. You'll just have to trust me on this one. NTFS is faster and more secure than Fat32 is on larger drives. On smaller like sub 25Gb drives Fat32 is faster. NTFS's speed advantage only kicks in on higher capacity drives. There's a rather simple command that isn't very easy to find that will convert your FAT32 partition to NTFS. Open the command prompt by hitting start and then selecting run and type: "Convert C: /FS:NTFS". Replace C: with whatever the drive letter you'd like to convert is. Also make sure there is a space between the C: and the foward slash (/). Once you press enter it will ask you for confirmation and press Y. Then press Y and enter once more to reboot. It will take between one hour and 15 minutes to convert to NTFS. Now you can set passwords for files and use encryption. This also works for windows XP Home. Unfortunately this makes the default cluster size 512 bytes instead of the 4kb that a clean format of NTFS provides.

Make NTFS run better ;)Now that you've converted over to NTFS or you had it already there's a few things that you'll want to do to make it run faster. NTFS was designed more for the server market and there's some features that we don't really need and can either tune a little bit or disable all together.