January 30th, 2006 in Lifehack, Technology

Tweak your Windows performance

Over at ActiveHowto.com, they have a quick howto on tweaking Windows’ default setting to improve your computer performance. Most of the tips there are pretty simple to perform, to disable some unnecessary services or remove some eye candy features. For instance, this one is quite useful to increase the shutdown speed:

IMPROVE XP SHUTDOWN SPEED

This tweak reduces the time XP waits before automatically closing any running programs when you give it the command to shutdown.

Go to Start then select Run
Type ‘Regedit’ and click ok
Find ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\’
Select ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’
Right click and select ‘Modify’
Change the value to ‘1000′
Click ‘OK’
Now select ‘HungAppTimeout’
Right click and select ‘Modify’
Change the value to ‘1000′
Click ‘OK’
Now find ‘HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop’
Select ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’
Right click and select ‘Modify’
Change the value to ‘1000′
Click ‘OK’
Now find ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\’
Select ‘WaitToKillServiceTimeout’
Right click and select ‘Modify’
Change the value to ‘1000′
Click ‘OK’

Make Your Windows Fast As Never Before! – [ActiveHowto.com]

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Leon Ho

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    • Heiden says on January 31st, 2006 at 7:04 am

      Reducing the time for Windows to wait for an application to quit (and writing data to disk) may have some serious consequences (like dataloss), depending on the application. Reducing it from 20000 ms (20 sec) to 1000 ms (1 sec) is not something I would recommend. There is a reason it is set to 20000 ms as default, don’t change it unless you are aware of what might happen if you are unfortunate.

    • Brad Isaac says on January 31st, 2006 at 10:20 am

      I like using speed up tweaks, thought I knew them all, then this Article comes out and I find even more speed goodness.

      Thanks for posting. I now have a shorter wait on booting. :)

    • microboy says on December 15th, 2008 at 9:45 am

      There is a reason for 20 seconds to wait for a win process to stop. Windows cannot work in any reasonable way. 20 seconds is not always too much, and is not always enough. But usually it is windows causing the pain. This OS SUCKS, and it is a pity that we have to use it. We could live much happier without microcrap.

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