Cuball's WebLog

Windows XP Performance Tweak

You need a minimum of 256MB of RAM before you make these changes.

Open your favorite registry editor and navigate to the following key:
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Areas to change are as follows

  1. DisablePagingExecutive - Double click it and in the decimal value field, put a 1. This will allow XP to keep data in memory instead of paging sections of RAM to the hard drive.
  2. LargeSystemCache - Double click it and change the decimal value to 1. This will allow the XP Kernel to Run in memory.
  3. Create a new DWORD value and name it IOPageLockLimit - Double click it and set the value in hex to 4000 if you have 128MB of RAM, 10000 if you have 256MB or 40000 if you have more than 512MB of RAM.
Posted: Aug 10 2004, 04:36 PM by Cuball | with 8 comment(s)
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Comments

Matt Hawley said:

Wow, my computer was fast after my rebuild, but damn is it faster now.
# August 10, 2004 10:37 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 11, 2004 1:47 AM

Omer van Kloeten said:

These tweaks locked me out of my own computer, as it said that I may not have permissions or that I have not enough resources to log onto my user, than raised an empty message box and my computer froze.
I use Windows XP SP2 on a Dell Latitude D600 (0.5GB RAM).

Lucky for me, I was paranoid enough to set a restore point.
# August 12, 2004 2:10 PM

John said:

I have done these tweaks on several machines with different memory configurations with no issues. Each of these machines is already SP2. I would imagine that the problem might be if you changed the registry entry for IOPageLockLimit to a range of memory that you dont have. Otherwise the other entries would not effect your machine that way.
# August 12, 2004 5:13 PM

Rob Conery said:

Alas i sit here with the exact same issue. I have 1G RAM and did exacltly as you said and OUCH! My little sweet Alienware is melting on my lap... :(

I have XP with SP2 as well...
# August 13, 2004 4:19 AM

Cuball said:

Sorry about the tweaks affecting your machines. I have sent a message to the moderator of the Distribution List that I found this information on. I have not had the problem personally happen to me either.
# August 15, 2004 4:10 AM

Kevin Wells said:

I just applied these settings and they worked well for me. I did create a restore point first however...and I was careful to copy and paste the exact name of the DWord Value.
Alienware may have been tweaked in another way that conflicted with these settings. Overclocked or something else.
# September 3, 2004 9:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 8, 2004 12:26 PM
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