nsl41288's Windows XP Tweak Guide!
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Sup, welcome to my tweak guide. I will be updating it with info whenever I feel that I have left something out (or if I fall asleep from boredom from writing this and come back to it later). This guide will help increase your boot time and overall performance of your windows xp-based computer. If you feel that you might need to spend money and get a new computer, I would recommend trying all the steps in this guide first and seeing if you can live with how it performs afterwards.
First things first. I'll write down all the basic tweaks that require no software at all to do. Then I'll write little mini-guides for software that I deem everyone should have. If you have any suggestions for stuff that I should add to this, reply to the thread or PM me and I'll add them to it. If you feel that I have done an awesome job, +rep me because that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside =)
~~Warning!~~ This guide is not meant for anyone who is using a computer that is owned by your work! If you are having any problems with your computer, I would suggest contacting your IT department and letting them handle it.
OK, enough talk. Let's start it!
~~Basic Windows Tweaks~~
Startup Programs: Most programs that you have installed on your computer adds programs to be started up when you load windows. While some of these are good, some of them are worthless and others can even be malware that will harm your computer.
Startup programs are put in 2 locations (and I suggest you check both)
1.) Start>Program Files>Startup folder, Unless its your antivirus or something that you absolutely must have, delete it from here.
2.) Start>run type "msconfig" without the quotes in the box and hit enter. Navigate to the Startup tab and uncheck everything there unless its antivirus stuff or others that you can't live without. If you don't know what something is, google it and determine if you must have it.
Services: Xp has some pretty useless services that can be turned off to help with ram usage and speed up your load times. Programs also add some services that will be started automatically as well that aren't necessarily useful either. If I don't list a service, then I suggest you either don't touch it or Google it and find out what it does before you decide whether or not to disable it.
Firstly, you have to get to the services menu. You can do this from 1 of 2 places.
First place is the exact same spot as #2 in the startup programs guide, except this time click the tab that says "services." From there you can even click a checkmark that says "hide all Microsoft services" so you know that you aren't disabling anything that you shouldn't. The services left over in the menu are program-specific services. Unless its for your antivirus or something you absolutely must have, I would disable all of them.
Second place(and more useful place in my opinion) is to go to Start>Run and type in "services.msc" without the quotes in the box and hit enter. From here you can see every possible service that could be loaded into windows. I would first off sort them by startup type by clicking the startup type tab. Anything that is set to automatic will load with windows. Anything set to Manual will load if a program tells it to load. And anything set to Disabled will not load under any circumstance. To disable a service, right-click it and select properties. Then you can stop it, switch the startup type to disabled and hit apply. For your convenience, I will list some services that I think you should disable:
1.)DNS Client: I disable this because it then forces your computer to check with the DNS server every time you load a web page. This is useful in case a web page changes I.P. addresses and your computer doesn't update this information from the DNS server. It doesn't really make you load pages slower and often times it helps with online gaming in case the server your trying to connect to has switched I.P.'s recently.
2.)Error Reporting Service: This is the most useles service ever. In theory, Microsoft will solve your problems and relay information to you to help you fix it with this. But Microsoft is a bunch of lazy bastards and this has never proven useful. All it does is slow your computer down.
3.)Fast User Switching: Unless you actually have more than 1 user account on your computer that you use, I would disable this. All it does is cache that other users preferences for when it switches and just takes up space.
4.)Help and Support: What? does anyone actually use this? lol
5.)Remote Registry: Just the thought of someone manipulating your registry remotely sends chills up my spine.
6.)Secondary Logon: Unless you want to share your computer with someone at the exact same time you are using it, I would strongly recommend disabling this.
7.)Security Center: lol who the hell uses this?
There are probably many more, just Google them and decide for yourself.
System Properties: This popup menu has lots of useful things you can do. You can find it by right-clicking "My Computer" and selecting "Properties." From here you can navigate to the different tabs to change options.
1.)General tab: Just displays basic information about your computer. Nothing to do here.
2.)Computer Name tab: This tab allows you to change your computer name and even your workgroup by clicking the change button. There isn't any reason to do this unless you want to make sure all your computers are on the same workgroup and named to what you want.
3.)Hardware tab: This tab allows you to view the device manager and change the way the computer will act when detecting new devices. You can even set up a hardware profile, but there isn't any reason to do this unless you are swapping out your hard drive from computer to computer on a constant basis. There really isn't anything to do here, I wasted your time reading this. Ha!
4.)Advanced tab: Now we're getting somewhere. This tab has Performance, User profiles, Startup and Recover, Environmental Variables, and Error reporting settings that you can change.
4.a.)Performance: Unless your computer was made 10 years ago, I suggest clicking "adjust for best appearance" to make windows look a lot better. In the advanced tab, make sure programs is bubbled for both options and click change for virtual memory. In this popup, you can change how much virtual memory you have and even what drive you want it to be on. I suggest putting it on the fastest drive that doesn't have windows and your programs on it so that if you need to use it, it will load up faster. But if your main drive is a SATA drive and your others are IDE, keep it on the SATA. I suggest setting a custom size of 2048 for initial and maximum size so your computer doesn't automatically resize it every 30 seconds. 2048 equates to 2 gigs of space on your hard drive. This is a fair value in my opinion. In the Data Execution Prevention tab, just leave it turned on. I haven't really found a reason not to or a reason to turn it off.
4.b.)User Profiles: This just lists your user profile. If you see more than one here, you may want to delete it to save space unless its a profile for someone else to use on the computer.
4.c)Startup and Recovery:This actually changes what your boot.ini says and how it behaves. I wouldn't touch this.
4.d)Environment Variables: Another menu that you shouldn't touch unless you know what your doing.
4.e)Error Reporting: Change this to disabled and uncheck the notify me if errors occurred. You'd know if your computer did a BSOD because you would see it.
5.)System Restore tab: This has actually proven useful to me in the past and I recommend leaving it turned on.
6.)Automatic Updates tab: Turn this off unless you like the idea of it automatically updating while you are gaming online. You can always visit the Microsoft website and update your stuff if you feel that it is necessary.
7.)Remote tab: Unless you want to connect to other people's computers remotely or allow them to connect to yours, I would uncheck both boxes.
Microsoft Updates
It is always a good idea to check the windows update website at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and see if there are any updates for your computer. They also sometimes put up driver updates for your hardware, but beware - my experience with downloading drivers from them has been a bad one. If it lists the AMD processor driver I would get it though.
It is also a good idea to update your DirectX. To do this you must download and run a file called "dxwebsetup.exe" that you can get from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&DisplayLang=en. I highly suggest doing this because DirectX is used in just about everything you do on your computer and having the most updated version will improve performance and functionality.
Drivers
Drivers help improve functionality and helps to support new software titles. If your new game is running under par, I would suggest looking for driver upgrades. If you bought your computer at a store, I would check the manufacturer's website to see what kind of downloads they have for your machine. If you built your computer yourself, then you will have to go to each individual hardware vendor and look up your specific model to see if they have any updates available.
BIOS Settings
The BIOS is the most basic software that your motherboard uses to boot the machine. To get to the BIOS, you must hit a certain key on your keyboard when you first start your machine and before it gets to the windows boot screen. It's usually either F1, F12, or Delete. Once in there you can set many different options. First, I would change the boot order to have your harddrive be the first on the list so it doesn't waste time checking the other drives for a bootable image. I would also disable any devices that you aren't using, like the Serial, Parallel, or even that firewire port that you don't ever use.
~~Program-Specific Tweaks~~
ccleaner: This program is free to download and use and a must-have for everybody. On top of removing unnecessary files that take up space, it also has a registry check built in to it. I would suggest running both checks and doing what it says. When you first install it, make sure to uncheck adding a desktop shortcut to it, as well as it automatically updating and adding the yahoo toolbar. You can access ccleaner by right-clicking your recycle bin and clicking "open ccleaner." I would also change some settings in the options menu before running this for the first time. If there are some cookies that you want to keep (for example cookies that auto-logon you to a certain site) add them to the cookies to keep list. Also in the advanced tab of the options menu, I would have the 48 hour checkbox checked as well as the hide warning messages checked and keep everything else unchecked.
Tweaknow RegCleaner Professional: This program is not free. I suggest either paying for it or getting it from a "friend." I'll leave the method up to you. This program is more comprehensive in cleaning the registry than ccleaner is. It also has a defragmenter to the registry built-in that will save you some space on your harddrive and load up windows faster. On top of that, it also has a track cleaner and some pretty sweet system tweaks that I suggest you take a look at. I will split this into a few sections to better explain all of its features.
1.)Registry Cleaner: Set this to "Extreme mode" and let it run its course. Depending on your machine this can take from anywhere from 5-30 minutes. Once its done, you will see all the errors it has found. All the safe to delete errors are already checked for you and you can hit the delete button to get rid of em. All the yellow errors are ones that may not be safe to delete, but in my experience I haven't found one that has blown my computer up. The downside is that you have to check each of them manually before deleting them. If it pops up that some couldn't be deleted, allow it to exclude them on further checks.
2.)Registry Defragmenter: I suggest using this after you use the Registry Cleaner. This will recreate your registry from scratch and make sure everything is continous and not fragmented in any way. This should speed up your loading times.
3.)Track Cleaner: By clicking Check All and then Clean Now, it will find any useless files used by those programs installed by your computer and delete them. This couldn't hurt.
4.)System Tweak: A very nice tweaking center for your computer. It can do lots of things that you may not even know you could do or even want to do. But for this guide, I will brush up on some things that I deem important
4.a.)Network: This will optimize your computer for whatever internet connection you are using. Just select the Wizard at the top, input your speed and the NIC you are using and it will do it for you. In the advanced tab, I suggest checking both checkboxes for MTU sizes as well as moving both sliders all the way to the right so it shows 10 connections each. Make sure you hit save at the top before exiting the window.
4.b.)Windows Core: In here I would check "monitor boot file launch only" so it would only load information viable to booting windows when windows boots. I would also empty the prefetch folder so it would start with a clean slate to saving information that it knows it will need for booting. This will make your next couple of boots slower but it will pay off once it figures out what it needs to save. In the windows time out tab, I would click the "recommended" button and leave the values to what it puts. In the cache tab, I would check the box if you have 256mb of ram or more, input the recommended size in the disk cache size field, and click the "try to detect your processor's l2 cache size" button and leaving it to what it finds. Click save and exit the window.
PerfectDisk 2008: This program is not free. I suggest either paying for it or getting it from a "friend." I'll leave the method up to you. As you might've expected, this program defragments your harddrive. It does a better job than the windows-embedded one and also comes with a few more nifty features. You can also select all your harddrives and have them all defrag at the same time. You can do the SMARTplacement if you want to, but I suggest just sticking with Defrag Only. You can also click the Boot Time checkbox to defrag all your files used during the booting process. Also, you can click the "system files" button to defrag the system files that you normally can't defrag. Doing so will prompt you to eventually restart your computer and have it do this before windows fully boots up. Defragmenting makes it so your harddrive can load whole files instead of loading a part of a file and searching for the next part(s) of the file on the disk. This obviously improves performance drastically. There's a few more things you can do with this program but I haven't really messed with them. Also when you first install it, it will ask to set up a schedule to auto-defrag. I suggest not setting one by checking "don't ask me again" and clicking close. There's nothing worse than having your harddrives being defragmented while playing a video game.
First things first. I'll write down all the basic tweaks that require no software at all to do. Then I'll write little mini-guides for software that I deem everyone should have. If you have any suggestions for stuff that I should add to this, reply to the thread or PM me and I'll add them to it. If you feel that I have done an awesome job, +rep me because that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside =)
~~Warning!~~ This guide is not meant for anyone who is using a computer that is owned by your work! If you are having any problems with your computer, I would suggest contacting your IT department and letting them handle it.
OK, enough talk. Let's start it!
~~Basic Windows Tweaks~~
Startup Programs: Most programs that you have installed on your computer adds programs to be started up when you load windows. While some of these are good, some of them are worthless and others can even be malware that will harm your computer.
Startup programs are put in 2 locations (and I suggest you check both)
1.) Start>Program Files>Startup folder, Unless its your antivirus or something that you absolutely must have, delete it from here.
2.) Start>run type "msconfig" without the quotes in the box and hit enter. Navigate to the Startup tab and uncheck everything there unless its antivirus stuff or others that you can't live without. If you don't know what something is, google it and determine if you must have it.
Services: Xp has some pretty useless services that can be turned off to help with ram usage and speed up your load times. Programs also add some services that will be started automatically as well that aren't necessarily useful either. If I don't list a service, then I suggest you either don't touch it or Google it and find out what it does before you decide whether or not to disable it.
Firstly, you have to get to the services menu. You can do this from 1 of 2 places.
First place is the exact same spot as #2 in the startup programs guide, except this time click the tab that says "services." From there you can even click a checkmark that says "hide all Microsoft services" so you know that you aren't disabling anything that you shouldn't. The services left over in the menu are program-specific services. Unless its for your antivirus or something you absolutely must have, I would disable all of them.
Second place(and more useful place in my opinion) is to go to Start>Run and type in "services.msc" without the quotes in the box and hit enter. From here you can see every possible service that could be loaded into windows. I would first off sort them by startup type by clicking the startup type tab. Anything that is set to automatic will load with windows. Anything set to Manual will load if a program tells it to load. And anything set to Disabled will not load under any circumstance. To disable a service, right-click it and select properties. Then you can stop it, switch the startup type to disabled and hit apply. For your convenience, I will list some services that I think you should disable:
1.)DNS Client: I disable this because it then forces your computer to check with the DNS server every time you load a web page. This is useful in case a web page changes I.P. addresses and your computer doesn't update this information from the DNS server. It doesn't really make you load pages slower and often times it helps with online gaming in case the server your trying to connect to has switched I.P.'s recently.
2.)Error Reporting Service: This is the most useles service ever. In theory, Microsoft will solve your problems and relay information to you to help you fix it with this. But Microsoft is a bunch of lazy bastards and this has never proven useful. All it does is slow your computer down.
3.)Fast User Switching: Unless you actually have more than 1 user account on your computer that you use, I would disable this. All it does is cache that other users preferences for when it switches and just takes up space.
4.)Help and Support: What? does anyone actually use this? lol
5.)Remote Registry: Just the thought of someone manipulating your registry remotely sends chills up my spine.
6.)Secondary Logon: Unless you want to share your computer with someone at the exact same time you are using it, I would strongly recommend disabling this.
7.)Security Center: lol who the hell uses this?
There are probably many more, just Google them and decide for yourself.
System Properties: This popup menu has lots of useful things you can do. You can find it by right-clicking "My Computer" and selecting "Properties." From here you can navigate to the different tabs to change options.
1.)General tab: Just displays basic information about your computer. Nothing to do here.
2.)Computer Name tab: This tab allows you to change your computer name and even your workgroup by clicking the change button. There isn't any reason to do this unless you want to make sure all your computers are on the same workgroup and named to what you want.
3.)Hardware tab: This tab allows you to view the device manager and change the way the computer will act when detecting new devices. You can even set up a hardware profile, but there isn't any reason to do this unless you are swapping out your hard drive from computer to computer on a constant basis. There really isn't anything to do here, I wasted your time reading this. Ha!
4.)Advanced tab: Now we're getting somewhere. This tab has Performance, User profiles, Startup and Recover, Environmental Variables, and Error reporting settings that you can change.
4.a.)Performance: Unless your computer was made 10 years ago, I suggest clicking "adjust for best appearance" to make windows look a lot better. In the advanced tab, make sure programs is bubbled for both options and click change for virtual memory. In this popup, you can change how much virtual memory you have and even what drive you want it to be on. I suggest putting it on the fastest drive that doesn't have windows and your programs on it so that if you need to use it, it will load up faster. But if your main drive is a SATA drive and your others are IDE, keep it on the SATA. I suggest setting a custom size of 2048 for initial and maximum size so your computer doesn't automatically resize it every 30 seconds. 2048 equates to 2 gigs of space on your hard drive. This is a fair value in my opinion. In the Data Execution Prevention tab, just leave it turned on. I haven't really found a reason not to or a reason to turn it off.
4.b.)User Profiles: This just lists your user profile. If you see more than one here, you may want to delete it to save space unless its a profile for someone else to use on the computer.
4.c)Startup and Recovery:This actually changes what your boot.ini says and how it behaves. I wouldn't touch this.
4.d)Environment Variables: Another menu that you shouldn't touch unless you know what your doing.
4.e)Error Reporting: Change this to disabled and uncheck the notify me if errors occurred. You'd know if your computer did a BSOD because you would see it.
5.)System Restore tab: This has actually proven useful to me in the past and I recommend leaving it turned on.
6.)Automatic Updates tab: Turn this off unless you like the idea of it automatically updating while you are gaming online. You can always visit the Microsoft website and update your stuff if you feel that it is necessary.
7.)Remote tab: Unless you want to connect to other people's computers remotely or allow them to connect to yours, I would uncheck both boxes.
Microsoft Updates
It is always a good idea to check the windows update website at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and see if there are any updates for your computer. They also sometimes put up driver updates for your hardware, but beware - my experience with downloading drivers from them has been a bad one. If it lists the AMD processor driver I would get it though.
It is also a good idea to update your DirectX. To do this you must download and run a file called "dxwebsetup.exe" that you can get from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&DisplayLang=en. I highly suggest doing this because DirectX is used in just about everything you do on your computer and having the most updated version will improve performance and functionality.
Drivers
Drivers help improve functionality and helps to support new software titles. If your new game is running under par, I would suggest looking for driver upgrades. If you bought your computer at a store, I would check the manufacturer's website to see what kind of downloads they have for your machine. If you built your computer yourself, then you will have to go to each individual hardware vendor and look up your specific model to see if they have any updates available.
BIOS Settings
The BIOS is the most basic software that your motherboard uses to boot the machine. To get to the BIOS, you must hit a certain key on your keyboard when you first start your machine and before it gets to the windows boot screen. It's usually either F1, F12, or Delete. Once in there you can set many different options. First, I would change the boot order to have your harddrive be the first on the list so it doesn't waste time checking the other drives for a bootable image. I would also disable any devices that you aren't using, like the Serial, Parallel, or even that firewire port that you don't ever use.
~~Program-Specific Tweaks~~
ccleaner: This program is free to download and use and a must-have for everybody. On top of removing unnecessary files that take up space, it also has a registry check built in to it. I would suggest running both checks and doing what it says. When you first install it, make sure to uncheck adding a desktop shortcut to it, as well as it automatically updating and adding the yahoo toolbar. You can access ccleaner by right-clicking your recycle bin and clicking "open ccleaner." I would also change some settings in the options menu before running this for the first time. If there are some cookies that you want to keep (for example cookies that auto-logon you to a certain site) add them to the cookies to keep list. Also in the advanced tab of the options menu, I would have the 48 hour checkbox checked as well as the hide warning messages checked and keep everything else unchecked.
Tweaknow RegCleaner Professional: This program is not free. I suggest either paying for it or getting it from a "friend." I'll leave the method up to you. This program is more comprehensive in cleaning the registry than ccleaner is. It also has a defragmenter to the registry built-in that will save you some space on your harddrive and load up windows faster. On top of that, it also has a track cleaner and some pretty sweet system tweaks that I suggest you take a look at. I will split this into a few sections to better explain all of its features.
1.)Registry Cleaner: Set this to "Extreme mode" and let it run its course. Depending on your machine this can take from anywhere from 5-30 minutes. Once its done, you will see all the errors it has found. All the safe to delete errors are already checked for you and you can hit the delete button to get rid of em. All the yellow errors are ones that may not be safe to delete, but in my experience I haven't found one that has blown my computer up. The downside is that you have to check each of them manually before deleting them. If it pops up that some couldn't be deleted, allow it to exclude them on further checks.
2.)Registry Defragmenter: I suggest using this after you use the Registry Cleaner. This will recreate your registry from scratch and make sure everything is continous and not fragmented in any way. This should speed up your loading times.
3.)Track Cleaner: By clicking Check All and then Clean Now, it will find any useless files used by those programs installed by your computer and delete them. This couldn't hurt.
4.)System Tweak: A very nice tweaking center for your computer. It can do lots of things that you may not even know you could do or even want to do. But for this guide, I will brush up on some things that I deem important
4.a.)Network: This will optimize your computer for whatever internet connection you are using. Just select the Wizard at the top, input your speed and the NIC you are using and it will do it for you. In the advanced tab, I suggest checking both checkboxes for MTU sizes as well as moving both sliders all the way to the right so it shows 10 connections each. Make sure you hit save at the top before exiting the window.
4.b.)Windows Core: In here I would check "monitor boot file launch only" so it would only load information viable to booting windows when windows boots. I would also empty the prefetch folder so it would start with a clean slate to saving information that it knows it will need for booting. This will make your next couple of boots slower but it will pay off once it figures out what it needs to save. In the windows time out tab, I would click the "recommended" button and leave the values to what it puts. In the cache tab, I would check the box if you have 256mb of ram or more, input the recommended size in the disk cache size field, and click the "try to detect your processor's l2 cache size" button and leaving it to what it finds. Click save and exit the window.
PerfectDisk 2008: This program is not free. I suggest either paying for it or getting it from a "friend." I'll leave the method up to you. As you might've expected, this program defragments your harddrive. It does a better job than the windows-embedded one and also comes with a few more nifty features. You can also select all your harddrives and have them all defrag at the same time. You can do the SMARTplacement if you want to, but I suggest just sticking with Defrag Only. You can also click the Boot Time checkbox to defrag all your files used during the booting process. Also, you can click the "system files" button to defrag the system files that you normally can't defrag. Doing so will prompt you to eventually restart your computer and have it do this before windows fully boots up. Defragmenting makes it so your harddrive can load whole files instead of loading a part of a file and searching for the next part(s) of the file on the disk. This obviously improves performance drastically. There's a few more things you can do with this program but I haven't really messed with them. Also when you first install it, it will ask to set up a schedule to auto-defrag. I suggest not setting one by checking "don't ask me again" and clicking close. There's nothing worse than having your harddrives being defragmented while playing a video game.
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I recommend that users who didn't already know about any of these Windows programs or tweaks stay away from their system settings. On a services level, lots of them can be useless, but in an IT support environment or a multi-user home environment, who knows what you'll be screwing with. Someone else might seriously need that program to start up at boot time.
My laptop has the BIOS key at F12 and select boot device at F2. With BIOS updates, do not apply them unless there is a note about I/O performance increases or an urgent bugfix that effects you. Some BIOS updates can break your computers configurations from time to time.
Vista users will find that Microsoft Updates are managed internally, and will need to navigate to their control panel to set the settings or manually update.
I use this feature daily with clients. Having to call them to ask them to turn it on again would be a hassle.
My laptop has the BIOS key at F12 and select boot device at F2. With BIOS updates, do not apply them unless there is a note about I/O performance increases or an urgent bugfix that effects you. Some BIOS updates can break your computers configurations from time to time.
Vista users will find that Microsoft Updates are managed internally, and will need to navigate to their control panel to set the settings or manually update.
nsnumbers wrote...
7.)Remote tab: Unless you want to connect to other people's computers remotely or allow them to connect to yours, I would uncheck both boxes.I use this feature daily with clients. Having to call them to ask them to turn it on again would be a hassle.
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I totally agree, Hibia. You should never mess with the system settings of a computer that is used at work or school as those computers should be handled by their IT department. This guide was mainly aimed at people who only use their computer at home for gaming, internet, email and the such. Also, I'd hope that there isn't anyone who is at work or school who is reading this right now -.-
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nsl41288 wrote...
I totally agree, Hibia. You should never mess with the system settings of a computer that is used at work or school as those computers should be handled by their IT department. This guide was mainly aimed at people who only use their computer at home for gaming, internet, email and the such. Also, I'd hope that there isn't anyone who is at work or school who is reading this right now -.-Heh, I sometimes tunnelled my browser through my home server's SSH server, but didn't browse FAKKU too much.
Often people who work places but don't know a whole lot about IT play around on their work laptops and take tutorials such as these to 'speed' up their laptops rather than go through the support process.
[rant]Work laptops are not your toys. I don't know how many times I end up un-installing Limewire on these things that get brought in, virus ridden after someone disabled the anti-virus.[/rant]
Still recommend home users should be very careful when playing around with their system. Often people forget about something called common sense, and do stupid things very quickly. Nothing suggested here was stupid, but since every setup varies, something might not be so good.
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I recently began to play around with application virtualization/isolation. I am currently using Ceedo to do this, apart from some minor limitations it's a great program to use applications like firefox in stealth. Not only is this great for taking your whole software collection with you on a USB device, but also to make sure windows doesn't slow down over time.
I mainly do this to keep windows clean and running with the best performance. I'm not sure how this will work out over time, but it should help me to stop formatting every 3 to 4 months.
The only limitations i found so far are the 32-bit only installation, and not being able to install software that requires drivers to work.
Here are some applications I'm using: OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, uTorrent, eMule, Newsleecher, Foobar2000, Pidgin, Ashampoo Burning Studio, and UltimateDefrag.
I mainly do this to keep windows clean and running with the best performance. I'm not sure how this will work out over time, but it should help me to stop formatting every 3 to 4 months.
The only limitations i found so far are the 32-bit only installation, and not being able to install software that requires drivers to work.
Here are some applications I'm using: OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, uTorrent, eMule, Newsleecher, Foobar2000, Pidgin, Ashampoo Burning Studio, and UltimateDefrag.