This is just a post to condense the two posts by Bloom and an old post I made for ease of reference. Bloom, if there's anything I miss please add it in.
1) Monitor Refresh rate
Be careful with this you may damage your monitor if it's a cheap POS. First thing's first, find out how high you can push your refresh rate by digging through your monitor's docs. If you've got a Dell hit
this site and get the monitor number off your invoice. NOT the model number, the series number. Mine is a 1000LS, model 1028L so I punch "1000LS" into the search box. It'll come up with the docs for it. Once you've got the max refresh rate possible for a given resolution, you're ready. Right-click on the open desktop, hit Properties, Settings Tab, Advanced button at the bottom. In that drop-down box, switch the monitor over to the refresh rate you want and hit Ok. I set mine to Optimal, which put it at 85Hz.
Trick: If you have a game that runs in a different resolution than your desktop, you are
NOT getting the same refresh rate! Say you're using Blood 2 in 800x600 rez, but your desktop is at 1024x768. An example: I have my desktop at 800x600, but run AH at 1024x768. Now at 800x600 my refresh rate is 85Hz (perfectly safe for my monitor) but at 1024x768 it drops to 60Hz. You fix it like so... Change your screen to 1024x768 and go back into the refresh rate screen liks I said above. Reset the refresh rate to 85Hz, then hit Ok. Accept the new changes and switch back to 800x600 rez. The next time I ran AH it was at 1024x768 and 85Hz refresh!
2) Typical Role
Got more than 64 megs of RAM? Right-click on My Computer > Properties > Performance Tab. See that box called "Typical role of this machine"....change that to "Network Server" and hit Ok twice. Reboot. As Bloom put it, "this takes windlows out of Winstupid mode when it comes to memory and swap file usage".
NOTE! if you've got Winblows 95 original don't do this. How do you check? Right click on My Computer > Properties. Right there it tells you the Winblows version. If it says "Windows 95 (4.00.950B)" or higher then you're safe.
3) Next would be verifying that Ultra DMA (Ultra ATA) is enabled. If it isn't, and your hard drive supports it, your system is performing about 20% slower than it should be. This setting applies to win95b, c, win98, 98se and ME. Anybody who has a hard drive capable of UDMA or UATA, which would be basically all drives made in the last 3 to 4 years, should have this turned on. Go here: start -> settings -> control panel -> system -> device manager tab -> find the "disk drives" item and click the "+" sign. You should now see a listing for your floppy drive and hard drive. If this setting is present, you will see something like "Generic IDE drive, type 47" or something similar. Click the name to make it turn blue, then click the properties button at the bottom of the screen. Now click the settings tab on the window that should have popped up. If you see a little check box that says "DMA" and it ISN'T checked, check it and restart. This will GREATLY improve HD performance.
(Kind of off topic, but if you have a CD burner that is always giving you trouble with buffer underruns, try this: Find the "CD-Drives" listing,click +, find your regular CD rom drive, properties, settings, turn DMA on for it as well. You may find that your burner works perfectly now.)
4) Swap file
Setting your own swap file can speed up your system, but if you've got a CD burner it can be a double-edged sword. Winblows might require up to 700 megs of swap file space, but if you set it to 200 megs it won't have enough to get the job done. Right click My Computer > Properties > Performance tab > Virtual Memory at the bottom. Specify how much swap file you want to use, putting the same value in both the MIN and MAX boxes. The only sure-fire safe way to do this, if you've got a Cd burner, is to place the swap file on a 900 meg drive partition. Now set the swap file to use a max of 750 megs. You could run it closer to the wire, but that could get ugly. One possible thing to do is set only the MINIMUM swap file size, which Bloom says might be better than letting Windoze do it all.
5) Desktop Icons
If you're one of those guys who insists on having every shortcut for every program on your desktop, you're an idiot. All those small things laying around chew up resources. I stuck all but five of mine in a sub-section in my Start Menu. Sure I have to fumble around in there, but the system isn't dragged down by 500 shortcuts I never use.
6) Fonts
The more fonts you have, the slower Windoze loads. Why? As Winblows boots up it has to load those fonts up too, which slows things down some. Now if you've only got 65 fonts you're fine, but I've had as many as 372! That slowed things down a lot for me. So ditch some fonts to get it under the 260 mark and you'll be better off. Windoze will load a shade faster and you might pick up a few extra frames per second.
7) Background crap
www.abtons-shed.com has something called Tweak All. Download it and slide over to the "Run Programs" tab to find out what's going on in the background. See, when you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del
once to find out what's running, not everything will show up. If a program says it a service, Windoze won't let you stop it from running. Tweak All will show you everything that's run at start up, and let you turn it off permanently. Explorer, rnaap, systray, and a few others are the most that should be running. Anti-virus stuff should be turned off, along with that Photoshop animation you love. Turn off all those Windoze event sounds too since they can add up. On start up, shutdown, run program, close program...only use a sound for when you empty the Trash Can...err Recycle Bin. Any more than that is a waste of horsepower.
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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight SchoolPut the P-61B in Aces High"With all due respect Chaplian, I don't think my maker wants to hear from me right now. I'm gonna go out there and remove one of His creations from this universe.
And when I get back I'm gonna drink a bottle of Scotch like it was Chiggy von
Richthofen's blood and celebrate his death."
Col. McQueen, Space: Above and Beyond 
