Windows XP tips

[screaming]

I got this link as part of a newsletter I'm subscribed to.  It might be of interest to some of you Windows XP folk.

-Steve

[Minwah]

Nice link, I'll have to spend a bit of time on that some day...

[TalkingOctopus]

Nice...now I gotta see if this will make XP more usable on an old 600 mHz Athlon.  It is really struggling right now!  Hopefully, it can be sped up.

[wboy]

Great link there!

Another good site for registry enhancements for 98 thru XP is http://www.winguides.com/registry/

[JoeB]

Nice...now I gotta see if this will make XP more usable on an old 600 mHz Athlon.  It is really struggling right now!  Hopefully, it can be sped up.

Are you serious?  I got XP running on a spare machine super fast.. (not for MAME.. but rather just word processing, internet and photoshop).  The box is a 500 Mhz P3 with 500MB of RAM!

And it FLIES!!!  Just turn off all the eye candy (i.e. revert back to the '95 look) + turn off services you don't use and see how fast it can go!

[SirPoonga]

Are you serious?  I got XP running on a spare machine super fast.. (not for MAME.. but rather just word processing, internet and photoshop).  The box is a 500 Mhz P3 with 500MB of RAM!

What do you mean?  I run mame on a PIII 500 with 256 megs of ram

[Howard_Casto]

Ewwe... xp without the xp look.  That's almost as bad as that hack to make 98 look like 3.11.  

[TalkingOctopus]

Are you serious?  I got XP running on a spare machine super fast.. (not for MAME.. but rather just word processing, internet and photoshop).  The box is a 500 Mhz P3 with 500MB of RAM!

What do you mean?  I run mame on a PIII 500 with 256 megs of ram

well this pc was patched together with a bunch of old rejected components sitting around.  It has an ancient hard drive and only 128 MB of ram.  All of the caching kills it  

[MnMCaputo]

Heres a program i use with xp, its automatically changes some settings and stops some processes.  Basically, prior to using it I scored a 1512 on the over system benchmark from www.pcpitstop.com but after running the program, i scored 1554, not a HUGE difference but still good enough to mention
http://www.xpantispy.org/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=26&func=fileinfo&parent=category&filecatid=5

[AlanS17]

I had XP running my MAME machine on a 450Mhz machine with 256MB of RAM and it worked just fine. I don't see why some people have such trouble with older hardware or why so many people insist on having the newest, greatest PC for emulation...

[Paul Olson]

Here's a good page for services.  He explains them pretty well and advises which ones are OK to disable.  Might help speed things up a bit.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm

As far as XP on lower-end machines, ram is the key.  128 is the bare minimum, 256 will actually be enjoyable to use.  I have it on a p3 500, and it was miserably slow with 128mb ram.  I upgraded to 256 and it runs fine.  I don't use it for MAME though, it's a laptop with an 11gb harddrive, it doesn't hold much.

Oh, by the way, speaking of hard drives.  CompUSA has 250gb Maxtors for $129.  Sale is on till Saturday 6/5.

Paul