You may have tried many tweaks like modifying windowsXP start-up applications, prefetches, unload DLLs method,etc. And yes those methods do work for me.
I have just accidentally found out another way to give you an extra boost in windowsXP's boot performance. This is done by disabling your unused devices in
Device Manager. for example, if you don't have input devices that are connected to one of your USBs or COM ports, disabling them will give you an extra perfromance boost in booting. Go to Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> device manager Disable devices that you don't use for your PC and then restart.
1.Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2.Locate the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement\PrefetchParameters
3.Make sure you backup the keys by exporting them to a .reg file.
4.On the EnablePrefetcher value, change the setting from 3 to 5 (decimal).
5.Close the registry editor.
6.Restart your computer
How to improve on shutdown time ? Close apps automatically & quickly at shutdown tip
Open Registry by going to START-RUN and typing REGEDIT. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\CONTROL PANEL\DESKTOP and look for AutoEndTasks. On my computer default value is 0. Change it to 1. Thats all. Further more you can reduce the time it takes for Windows to issue kill directive to all active/hung applications.
In doing this only constraint that you should make sure exists is that HungAppTimeout is greater than WaitToKillAppTimeout. Change the values of WaitToKillAppTimeout to say 3500 (since default value for HungAppTimeout 5000 and for WaitToKillAppTimeout is 20000)
Open Registry by going to START-RUN and typing REGEDIT. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction. In right hand panel look for Enable. Right click on it and set it 'Y' for enable. This is the way I have it set on my computer. This will help speedup boot time.
* Click Start, and then click Run.
* Type Regedit in the box, and then click OK.
* Expand the menu in the left panel and select the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop folder.
* Scroll down in the right panel and double click on the MenuShowDelay file.
* In the Value Data box, change to default value for the menu speed from 400 to a lesser number, such as 1.
*Click OK.
Caution: Incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making changes to the registry, you may want to back up any valued data on your computer.
To speed up your hard disk speed we need to configure a special buffer in the computer’s memory in order to enable it to better deal with interrupts made from the disk.
Follow these steps:
Run SYSEDIT.EXE from the Run command.
Expand the system.ini file window.
Scroll down almost to the end of the file till you find a line called [386enh].
Press Enter to make one blank line, and in that line type Irq14=4096
Note: This line IS CASE SENSITIVE!!!
Click on the File menu, then choose Save.
Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer.
Done. Speed improvement will be noticed after the computer reboots.
Update: The most speed improvement is visible with IDE drives, however there are reports that this tweak also does good for SCSI disks. In any case, it won’t harm your system, so why not try it yourself and let me know what you find.
At times it takes too long to open a folder, especially if it contains many video files. Here’s a way to speed up the display of contents. The delay arises because Windows tries to read the bitrate and the codecs used for previewing the video files. You can prevent the delay with a registry tweak. Select ‘Run’ from the Start menu, type ‘regedit’ and click on ‘OK’.
Navigate to the key ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAs sociations\.avi\shellex\
PropertyHandler’, right-click on ‘Default’ and delete it. Confirm the query with ‘Yes’ and close Regedit. In most cases, it should solve the problem. If you have
videos encoded in multiple formats, it slows down Explorer. In that case, you can disable the preview. Select ‘Run’ from the Start menu and enter ‘regsvr32.exe /u shmedia.dll’ and confirm with ‘OK’. You can undo the change by re-registering shmedia.dll. Simply enter ‘regsvr32.exe shmedia.dll’ in the ‘Run’ dialog box to reverse the process.