Performance Options

The 'System Properties' control panel has a lot of options.

The fastest way to get there, in Explorer, is to right-click on My Computer and choose Properties.

Pick the Advanced tab, and the 'Performance' Setting button. Right off, in the visual effect tab, you see a bunch of options you can play with. Feel free to set these to anything you want. Some of these I turn off not because they are slow my system down, but because they annoy the heck out of me, like 'Animate windows when maximizing and minimizing' and 'Fade or slide menus into view'. Delibrately doing things slower so they're 'animated' is somewhat goofy in my opinion. When I click on a menu, I want the menu to show up as soon as possible.

But some things there actually do take CPU time, like drawing shadows under everything and smoothing fonts and showing window contents with dragging. OTOH, those last two are very nice features, and I leave them on. But, your choice. (Showing window contents can really slow things down if you have desktop wallpaper. In fact, desktop wallpaper can slow things down regardless of that setting.)

When you're done there, click over to 'Advanced' and make sure both options are set to 'Programs'. They are by default, but check anyway. Then click 'Change'.

You'll see a screen that lets you set your virtual memory. Windows, by default, manages this, which is nice if you have low disk space because it will slowly grow the file. However, if you're willing to 'waste' 300 megs or so, you can speed things up.

If you have more than one hard drive, you're going to want to use the drive that Windows isn't installed on. If you have more than two physical drives, well, the best place is the faster drive on a different IDE channel, but it's not really that important. If you only have one drive, ignore all this. (If you've partitioned your drives, don't stick swap on a different partition that's on the primary drive. Put it on a physical drive that's not the Windows one. If you only have one physical drive and more than one partition, you want it on the Windows partition.)

Once you've decided on the drive you want it on, set all the other drives to 'No paging file'. Then, on that drive, select 'Custom size'. Now, what size you want here is somewhat debatable. A rough rule of thumb is the size of your memory, but feel free to set it up to twice as much if you've got hard drive space to spare. Make sure the total of real memory and swap is at least 512 megs. Now, set both the initial and maximum size to the amount you decided on, and click 'Set'. You'll need to reboot. Windows will create a swap file of that size, and no longer try to size it up and down as it goes along, which can seriously slow your computer down.