Quote from jficquette:
There is a tool called TweakXP, or Tweak XP. It optimizes windows for speed.
John
Never tried Ramdisk, either Cenatek or SuperSpeed version, but I'm going to give it a go.
Tweak XP has some useful features, Ive found more bells and whistles in it that don't have anything to do with performance.
I run a "stripped down" XP pro system, with about 7+ Windows services disabled (Messenger, Error reporting, updates, more). Have system turned off completely (and run manual backups of important dirs daily). Customized the "performance" setting in control panel to 'performance' instead of 'appearance' and all of Windows picks up in speed and responsiveness. XP uses a hefty amount of resources to create those curvy blue, 3D corners, shadows on windows, etc.
Biggest improvement in system speed was after moving XP and apps to Raid 0 with 2 Hitachi Deskpro 7200 rpm drives. Moved the system pagefile to a third Hitachi drive.
Diskeeper 9 defragments the most used disk partitions daily, and that makes a difference as well.
Esignal/Amibroker and Cybertrader run well on my P2.8, 1G, but then again I'm not running a dozen real-time backtesting scripts with something like IRT (a dozen EFS scripts will bog any machine down, or so I hear). After checking some of the older Ramdisk posts, a 30% increase in an app that does backtesting is a big performance gain.