Oddball stuff

Browse your computer faster

IE without startup page

Open IE and click tools --> Internet Options You'll see Home Page at the top of this. Click on the use blank box.

Visual effects in system panel

A noticeable performance boost can be found when you turn off alot of the eye candy in Win XP

Right click my computer, hit properties
advanced --> Performance --> settings
Adjust for best performance

Start menu speedup

To make your start menu show things quite a bit faster you will want to browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop./ and edit the MenuShowDelay key. Changing that to a lower number will result in faster performance.

L2 Cache size

Windows XP can't detect the proper amount of L2 cache on some CPU's like the Prescott. you'll want to go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] and change the SecondLevelDataCache key to the L2 cache size of your CPU (in Kb). I've received a few questions about this one and I thought I'd clarify it. when you select to modify this file the default entry is in hexadecimal simply change the selection to decimal and THEN enter your number. Such as 256, 512. A value of 100 in Hexadecimal will result in 256Kb being shown since that is what it's decimal number is.

Some have argued that this is only for the old systems that have their cache externally. I'm looking for more information on this right now.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"SecondLevelDataCache"="100"

Hardware Related

Increase USB Polling Interval

This sets the IdleEnable key to 1 where the default is 0. Basically changes the USB polling interval from 1ms to 5ms which can reduce CPU load. This is primarily a tweak for laptops which can save battery life and fixes a problem with some laptops entering the C3 processor power-saving state.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}

That's everything that I suggest using... If you'd like any additional information please post in the forum.