Oddball stuff

Visual effects in system panel

A noticeable performance boost can be found when you turn off alot of the eye candy in Win XP

Right click my computer, hit properties
advanced --> Performance --> settings
Adjust for best performance

Start menu speedup

To make your start menu show things quite a bit faster you will want to browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop./ and edit the MenuShowDelay key. Changing that to a lower number will result in faster performance.

L2 Cache size

Windows XP can't detect the proper amount of L2 cache on your CPU. you'll want to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Managementand change the SecondLevelDataCache key to the L2 cache size of your CPU (in Kb). I've received a few questions about this one and I thought I'd clarify it. when you select to modify this file the default entry is in hexadecimal simply change the selection to decimal and THEN enter your number. Such as 256, 512. A value of 100 in Hexadecimal will result in 256Kb being shown since that is what it's decimal number is.

Some have argued that this is only for the old systems that have their cache externally. I'm looking for more information on this right now.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"SecondLevelDataCache"="100"

Thanks for reading!

That's everything that I know about tweaking Windows XP for better performance. Sure there's alot more tweaks out there that don't truly affect performance. Please give all feedback in Please remember that this is in fact done at your own risk! Please don't even do one of these tweaks without backing your data up properly.