win XP

[Lucias_Clay]

I got my first look at win xp today when I went over to my nieces to help her set up her e-mail.It took me a few minutes to find some things and the set up windows looked very strange to me, almost transparent. And slow was not the word I would use,more like go bake a cake. I have seen the post about tweaking it and disabling the unnesacary stuff but I don't feel comfortable enough with it yet.I am going to do some reading up on it though using the black viper page. If there are any others please let me know. I did notice though it only has 128mb ram(I think)This I gather is not nearly enough. But all in all it had a pretty good feel to it.

[Budfred]

When I was setting up my sister's computer, I just printed out the Black Viper stuff and used almost every recommendation. It helped a lot and hasn't seemed to cause any problems. She has 512MB DDR RAM though and that is probably a big part of the reason it runs smoothly.

[Rick]

One of the easiest and reversible tweaks is easy and quick.
Go into control panel
double click on the system Icon
click on the Advanced Tab
Then the Performance Settings Button

You can then turn off or on any of the Fluff / bells and whistles you like
Or select one of the 4 options “ Let windows choose, Adjust for Best Appearance, Adjust for best performance , and custom

If you select Adjust for Best performance it will turn off all the fluff
And you will see a marked performance increase

If you find you want some or all the stuff turned on again
Just go back and reset it..

Well worth the effort
Start with the basic and move up :)
Faster and Faster

[jabarnutcase]

Yes- Rick's advice will certainly speed things up. As he said, you'll probably want to eventually add some of the "bells and whistles" back again though....Some of them are what makes XP so "pretty" :p

Black Vipers page is great, and if you stick with his "safe" configuration settings, (and even then only disable the services you are SURE you won't need), it speeds things up considerably.

(BV gives an explanation of exactly what each service does and you should always read these before disabling anything).

Another thing, if she is using NTFS as opposed to FAT32, it's going to be a little slower anyway...Tends to "speed up" over time though.

Last but not least, 128MB of Ram is the bare minimum- (It's M$'s minimum, and we all know what that means).
256MB is pretty much needed and 512MB is even better. (I have 768MB, but then again, I'm a "nutcase".
When all is said and done though, and you've tweaked till your satisfied, I think you would really like XP...I sure do! ;)

[Mark Miller]

The 128 is the killer. You can do all the tweaks in the world and you will not get around not having enough ram. I have 512 with all the bell and whistles running and I am at least 20% as fast as any box that had 98 or me on it [by that I mean any box I owned].
Memory is the key.
Mark :)

[Lucias_Clay]

Thanks all She is running an e-machine with an amd 2000+ processor.
Am going to look into all these suggestions.:D

[biggmc01]

Just an addon I tried XP at 128mb and found it worse than my older 98SE system. Added a stick of 256mb and it runs like a charm.

[abbey477]

The first time I used XP on 128 ram, I thought the computer was having a virus. I only added another stick of 256 ram and it came to life.
Don't turn off the beautiful flavor of XP, those are the reasons for not using window 2000 pro.