I apologize for not leaving a pointer to documentation on these bizarre java "hotspot" vm options. Here it is, from Sun's site.
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot/vmoptions.jsp
Elsewhere I posted about tuning Windows XP Win32PrioritySeparation, possibly running without a pagefile, in which case you want both adequate physical ram, and memory conservation by disabling prefetcher, and a number of optimizations which can be found in "tweak" articles across the internet.
Don't get "tweak-itis" !

But there are certain key tweaks you should apply to your main trading platform.
For filesystem speed, if there's lots of i/o, use the Windows command:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
This avoids writing a "last touched" timestamp every time the file is read.
There are so many things about comprehensive system tuning, but I can only tell you that a properly tuned java system can be screamingly fast.
All this talk about "realtime" with Windows is a joke. You can't get, and you don't need, "realtime" anyway, although "fast and responsive" is very important and achievable.
FS