How to Tweak the Registry to Improve XP Performance?

plato · Jul 21, 2004

As always, be sure to back up the registry before making changes.

You should have at least 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

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.

Reboot and you should notice that your system runs faster.
Click to expand...

Does this work? If it works, break it down to me SLOWLY.

;g

Toyman · Jul 21, 2004

Yes, it would work, if you have enough memory.

Slowly? Ok, basically the computer has RAM Memory (physical memory "chips") and page file memory (hard disk space). RAM is 100's of times faster than the page file, since it's just electronic and the hard disk is a physical medium that has to move.

Together it's called virtual memory. When Windows is managing the virtual memory, it pages out stuff in memory to the page file in an attempt to keep frequently used stuff in the faster memory.

Basically, these steps force windows to use RAM memory and not the slower page file, BUT you could get an out of memory error.